Most will be surprised by the relationship autism and vision and, although there is no visual pathology characteristic of autism, it is important to link them together.

Autism and visual diseases

The first thing I want to highlight is that many autistic children have visual disorders, from blindness, such as Leber blindness, up to disorders of the ocular motility and bad visual acuity.

Blindness has no major difficulty in its diagnosis but, there is an elevated group of children with impaired vision and not always accompanied by refraction disorders, such as myopia or others, that is, that visual deficit is not solved with glasses.

Treatments for the eyes in autistic children

The main problem we have with autistic children is that it is very difficult to explore their vision. We know that many of them do not look good. This fact is of real importance, since most of the therapies aimed at improving motor and social adaptation symptoms go through stimuli and visual exercises, such as the popular program TEACCH, one of the most used in autistic patients, as well as programs where good dynamic vision is required.

Autistic children have bad communication. For this reason, a therapy that does not work well, could be due not so much to the fact that it is not effective, but rather because the child does not see well and simply does not know how to express what is asked of him.

autism and vision

Asperger and vision

Along with the obvious pictures of autism, we must remember that there are other disorders in the autism environment (ASD). These are more overlapping and, therefore, more difficult to diagnose, such as Asperger's Syndrome, a painting that often remains hidden.

One of the characteristics of children with Asperger syndrome is that they have problems of social adaptation. They are usually solitary children who do not show delays in school follow-up, with good language learning and even very good in some subjects. They are very meticulous children but find it difficult to relate to their classmates. These cases can hide an autistic picture of Asperger that should be treated and, where again, the visual deficit can play an important role. The incidence of visual disturbances in children with Asperger syndrome is very high and the therapies that are used, most of them, are based on visual stimuli.

Ophthalmological review and autism

The reflection of these lines is to reach all the relatives of children with autism or similar disorders, such as Asperger, the need to study vision.

It is very common that in most school reviews or even with the ophthalmologist, they can go unnoticed and explain a greater delay and social conflicts, as well as a bad effectiveness of the therapies that are used in their treatment.

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Autism and vision
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Autism and vision
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Área Oftalmológica Avanzada
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