Ciliary muscle thickness not related to accommodative lag in adults with Down syndrome
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Key takeaways:
- Adults with Down syndrome had lower visual acuity, greater accommodative lag and steeper corneal curvature.
- Ciliary muscle thickness was not associated with accommodative response in either group.
Adults with Down syndrome did not have significant differences in ciliary muscle morphology from typically developing adults, despite having lower visual acuity and greater accommodative lag, according to study results.
“Vision problems, including strabismus, nystagmus and significant refractive errors, are coming in people with Down syndrome,” Valldeflors Vinuela-Navarro, PhD, MSc, BSc, MCOptom, a lecturer in the department of optics and optometry at Polytechnic University of Catalonia, and colleagues wrote in Ophthalmic and Physiological Optics. “Accommodative deficits are also highly prevalent in this population.”
They continued, “The purpose of this study was to investigate further differences in the morphology of the ciliary muscle between individuals with and without Down syndrome, with the aim to characterize this key accommodative structure in Down syndrome in more detail and determine the etiology of accommodative deficits in this population.”
The study included 16 participants with Down syndrome (women, n = 9; mean age, 25.87 years) and 16 participants without Down syndrome (women, n = 12; mean age, 24.12 years). Researchers obtained temporal and nasal images of participants’ ciliary muscle and also measured axial length, anterior chamber depth, lens thickness and corneal curvature.
According to results, participants with Down syndrome had lower visual acuity than the control group (P < .001) and greater accommodative lag (P < .001). However, there was no significant difference between groups in ciliary muscle parameters, nor an association between ciliary muscle thickness and accommodative response in either group.
Researchers noted that participants with Down syndrome had steeper corneal curvature than those without (corneal radius 1, P = .003; corneal radius 2, P < .001).
“The results of the present study suggest that the ciliary muscle morphology is not different in the population with Down syndrome, and therefore it is unlikely that the ciliary muscle is responsible for the accommodative deficit found in Down syndrome,” researchers wrote. “The next step in the field of accommodation in Down syndrome would be to explore sensory differences or deficits that could result in accommodative impairments in this population.”
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