Abstract

  The relationship between visual field defects, consecutive onset of squint and double vision has been studied for diseases with slowly progressive deterioration: 1.) Age-related maculopathy, characterized mainly by central scotomas which can be incomplete, quasi sievelike and allow to maintain fusion; if they are dense, without isles of intact retina or extent over the visual field, fusion will be interrupted and one eye will drift into divergence. These patients see the developed double pictures only partly due to a local lack of perception. An example: The frame of the TV-screen appears with shifted double contour but the speaker in the centre is seen single. We have called this anomaly "peripheral diplopia"; the degree of shift indicates the squint angle. Other patients report indistinct symptoms like seeing clouds, blurred vision or the repeated closing of one eye to see better; these statements allow no diagnosis but may raise the suspicion of binocular problems or not perceptible double vision; these complaints we classified to be "masked diplopia", because after prismatic squint correction they vanish at once. 2.) Glaucoma patients have fewer binocular problems, diplopia arises late when the binasal visual defects reach the macular region and fusion- and convergence- insufficiency cause a divergent eye position; by prism correction the reading ability can be restored. The years before this event the patient may have had asthenopic complaints caused by fusion weakening consequent to retinal decay; he realizes only serious deterioration of vision. The loss of fusion power is most aggravating where the function is the best: In the region between 2° and 10°-12° eccentricity from the foveola. The aim of this paper is to point out that indistinct complaints of elderly patients may indicate binocular problems or even diplopia.

Keywords: Visual Field Defects and Fusion Power; Masked Diplopia; Peripheral Double Pictures; Exotropia; Prism Correction

References

1. Stangler-Zuschrott E. “Geriatric Orthoptics and Non-Paretic Diplopia in Adults”. Nova Science Publishers, Inc. New York, (2016):126.
2. Stangler-Zuschrott E. “Diplopia developed in Later life, an Ophthalmologic Approach”. In: Geriatrics Health, ed. Hülya Cakmur, Intech Open Books, pg 9-26.
3. Stangler-Zuschrott E. “Masked Loss of Binocularity in the Elderly. Short communication”. International Journal of Ophthalmology and Vision Research2 (2018):026-027.

Citation

Citation: Elfriede Stangler-Zuschrott. "Visual Field Defects and Binocularity in Cases of Age-Related Maculopathy and Glaucoma".Acta Scientific Medical Sciences 4.1 (2020): 22-26.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2020 Elfriede Stangler-Zuschrott. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.