Childhood Eye Tests Are Good For Long-term Eye Health
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), about 60% to 80% of vision problems are preventable through early diagnosis. Maria Fernanda Abalem, physician at the Department of Ophthalmology at Hospital das Clínicas, Faculty of Medicine, University of São Paulo, provides important guidelines on prevention.
Eye health maintenance
The doctor explains that ametropias, that is, errors in glasses, are protagonists in cases of low vision. “Today we have ametropias as a common cause of low vision in children and later in adults. We still have people who cannot see simply because they did not have access to a refraction test”.
Identifying these problems in childhood is decisive for long-term eye health: “If they are not treated in childhood, which is the period when vision is developing, we cannot have a reversal of this vision in the future, even if the person has access to glasses”, says Maria Fernanda.
It is essential to do the eye test while still in the maternity ward: “It is a test that can detect an opacity that may be due to a congenital cataract, a retinoblastoma and some other more serious congenital disease”. After this test and identifying that everything is fine, it is recommended that the child undergo an ophthalmological examination in the first year of life.
However, care does not stop there: “It is extremely important that parents and the school itself are also alert to school development, to see if the child has a good cognitive and motor development, because many children are misdiagnosed with some disease of neurological origin, when in fact they have a part of vision. If the child does not have any major diagnosis or ametropia detected in the first year of life, it is important that this monitoring continues so that this child does not reach adolescence with a more permanent disease and that there is no possibility of reversal”, warns the doctor.
Other causes of blindness
Maria Fernanda warns of other causes of blindness such as cataracts and glaucoma, which are frequent. “Cataract is a disease that represents an aging of the eye. We have a lens in the eye called crystalline and when it gets older, it stops being crystalline and starts to become opaque.” However, it is possible to operate, being a totally reversible cause of blindness, as explained by the doctor.
Glaucoma is already a silent disease, which happens in the optic nerve and represents the loss of peripheral vision. Maria Fernanda once again reiterates the importance of preventive exams: “Since it is a silent disease, many patients only notice a decrease in vision when the disease is already very advanced, something that in a routine evaluation we could detect an increase in intraocular pressure, the viability of the peripheral field and the evaluation of the optic nerve itself”, he adds.