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Learning Disorders and Treatment

Vision related learning disorders are common, and occur in 20% of the childhood population.

They are often difficult to identify without a thorough vision evaluation, and if not identified and remediated, they are often the cause of underachievement that didn’t need to happen.

Among the most common learning disorders is Hyperopia. A child who is hyperopic has reading difficulty, but passes the school vision test easily, leading parents to believe that something else is causing the problem. To detect the problem, a complete evaluation of the focusing and convergence systems is required. This is a normal part of a routine eye examination for a child, and easily discloses the problem. The solution is easy and instant. In cases such as these, reading glasses are required. People are misled by hyperopia because it doesn’t affect distance vision unless the hyperopic error is very large. It doesn’t cause things to be blurry, but it destabilizes eye movement control, critical to effective reading. Children affected by hyperopia loose their places when reading, and frequently skip words.

Another common cause of reading and learning disorders is Dyslexia. Dyslexia doesn’t happen in the eye, it happens in the brain. The eye generates vision data that it sends to the brain, and the brain interprets the data. Words and letters contain intelligence that require the brain to cross reference information stored in different brain locations, and dyslexia interferes with the brain’s ability to make the connections. This interference is caused by microscopic architectural structural defects in the brain, and cannot be changed. Some forms of dyslexia are treatable, and some require a different educational strategy. Dyslexia can be identified by type (there are 3) using the Dyslexia Determination Test, an evaluation that takes about an hour.

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