Worse binocular vision observed in patients with MS
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Patients with multiple sclerosis were found to have alterations in binocular vision, particularly if optic neuritis was present, according to a study published in Clinical Optometry.
“A high percentage of eye-movement anomalies have been reported in patients with MS due to the demyelination process of the neural substrate of ocular muscles, and affected binocular vision could be another visual consequence of the MS, as occurs in other neurodegenerative diseases,” Amparo Gil-Casas, MS, PhD, associate professor at the University of Valencia, Spain, and colleagues wrote. “Due to the scarce scientific literature in this regard, the aim of this study was to explore binocular vision in patients with MS and report the presence of abnormal results in comparison to healthy controls.”
Researchers enrolled 85 participants from two optometry clinics in Spain, including 59 patients with MS and a control group of 26 patients without MS. Participants with MS were subdivided into three groups: 11 with binocular optic neuritis, 21 with monocular optic neuritis and 27 without optic neuritis.
The study found a prevalence of abnormal stereopsis values, indicating worse binocularity, in 7.7% of patients in the control group as compared with 100% of patients with MS with binocular optic neuritis, 70.8% of patients with MS with monocular optic neuritis and 53% of patients with MS without optic neuritis.
There was also a higher prevalence of esophoria in both far and near distances observed in patients with MS across the three subgroups. However, near point of convergence and positive fusional vergence were not found to differ significantly between the study participants.
“The high proportion of esophoria in MS patients indicates that more studies are needed for analyzing the heterophoria-divergence relationship in these subjects,” the study authors wrote. “Although [near point of convergence] and positive fusional vergence did not differ significantly between MS and healthy subjects, the variability of such parameters suggests a certain level of instability that should be investigated.”
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