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Case studies find delayed visual loss in ‘stable’ optic neuropathy
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Adult patients who suffered optic nerve damage as children can experience delayed, gradual vision loss due to age-related axonal loss in an already depleted population of neurons, three case reports suggest.
Jonathan W. Kim, MD, and colleagues reviewed the medical records of three patients with presumably “stable” optic neuropathy who experienced slowly progressive visual loss in adulthood after suffering childhood optic nerve injuries.
All three patients had a monophasic illness as children that caused bilateral optic atrophy and visual impairment. After decades of stability, they experience a visual decline that lasted over years. No other ophthalmologic, systemic or neurological disorders were found to cause the visual declines they were experiencing.
“Slow, delayed visual impairment in the setting of severe bilateral visual loss following a presumably static optic neuropathy may require decades of careful observation and examination before it can be detected clinically,” Dr. Kim and colleagues stated. “We suspect that this clinical phenomenon may be more common than generally recognized.”
Their cases studies are published in the June issue of the Archives of Ophthalmology.