Duration of form deprivation and visual outcome in infants with bilateral congenital cataracts

Visual Outcomes of Congenital Cataract Surgery in a Tertiary Public Hospital in Bangladesh

“…It was found that visual outcomes were significantly better when surgery was performed at the age of 2 to 3 months than at 3 to 12 months (Table 8). This was similar to the findings of the studies of Hua et al, 9 Rogers et al, 13 and Jain et al 14 Nevertheless, it did not correlate with the study of Khanna et al 15 In this study, preoperative nystagmus was present in 44 eyes. Several studies show that the presence of nystagmus has been considered as an indicator of poor prognosis in infants with bilateral congenital cataracts.…”

Educational paper

“…Lambert and Drack [32] demonstrated that the equivalent latent period for bilateral visual deprivation may be as long as 10 weeks, and this correlates well with previous published studies of outcomes in infants with bilateral congenital cataracts [25,37,49]. Jain et al [28] reported that visual acuity after surgery for bilateral congenital cataracts appears to decline exponentially with duration of visual deprivation although Birch et al [10] described a bilinear model with increased deprivation amblyopia in bilateral cases operated after 14 weeks. The latent period for other visual modalities such as ocular alignment and fixation stability may be as short as 3 weeks [1].…”

Auditory, tactile, and audiotactile information processing following visual deprivation.

“…The possibility of restoring vision in patients suffering from congenital or early onset blindness through cataract removal or corneal transplantation offers the possibility of exploring which visual functions retain the potentiality to recover and which are compromised by the lack of developmental visual inputs (for reviews, see Bavelier, Levi, Li, Dan, & Hensch, 2010;Huxlin, 2008;Levin, Dumoulin, Winawer, Dougherty, & Wandell, 2010; T. L. Lewis & Maurer, 2009;Maurer, Lewis, & Mondloch, 2005;Maurer, Mondloch, & Lewis, 2007;Merabet & Pascual-Leone, 2010;Sabel, 2008). The data from unimodal visual studies suggest that the neural circuits that process different visual functions can be differentially affected by visual deprivation and follow different lines of recovery, as a function of the age at which surgery occurs (Hensch, 2005;Hook & Chen, 2007;Jain, Ashworth, Biswas, & Lloyd, 2010;Ostrovsky, Andalman, & Sinha, 2006) and the remaining capacity of visual leaming (Fine et al, 2003). Until recently, the consequences of the re-afferentation of visual inputs after a period of visual deprivation on multisensory integration had never been explored.…”