Walt Decherd Wellbeing

The Power of a Lens For Children With Learning Disabilities

Walt Decherd Information About Visual System By Darin Browne

Children with learning disabilities may be helped by the use of reading glasses, but is this the full story?

As a practicing Behavioral Optometrist for over 25 years, I recognize that vision is the dominant sense in the classroom, with over 80% of all information coming in through the visual system. So it makes sense that any disturbance in vision can affect a child’s learning ability. However, having a simple eye test is very often far short of providing the answers desperate parents are looking for.

The symptoms of children with learning disabilities who have visual problems include

Reduced concentration,
Sore eyes or excessive eye rubbing,
Headaches or tiredness after reading
Frustration when reading or writing
Misreading or skipping words or lines
Avoiding, crying or screaming when forced to do homework

Children with learning disabilities experience many of these difficulties, and these can often be significantly reduced by a competent eye examination and the correct reading glasses. But is it enough? Does simply putting glasses on a child and solving their basic visual difficulties mean that the child is cured?

Obviously this is frequently not the case! How can a pair of glasses help a child to spell better? How can glasses stop a child writing things backwards, or help them to code or sequence more effectively? Yes, I am the first to agree that reading glasses can help relieve many problems in children with learning disabilities, but throughout the years I have come to understand that more is needed.

The thing is that, even wearing the right glasses if they are required, these children lack the visual skills necessary to perform the job of reading, writing or spelling. these skills are not innate, neither are they magically endowed with any appliance, such as a lens, a colored lens, an ADHD pill or anything else. They have to be learned, and they have to be learned correctly if the child is to progress in their learning to become an effective student.

This makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? If we want our child to be a great footballer, we send them to football practice to teach them the skills of the game. If we want them to be good at tennis, we send them to tennis coaching so they learn and train the appropriate skills. If we want them to play piano, we don’t just sit them in front of the piano making them play over and over again, do we? We have piano lessons, and they learn the skills that are required to play the piano.

Yet, when it comes to reading, we just make children with learning disabilities struggle on, and yes, the right reading glasses may help, but how much greater will their progress be if we couple this with training the appropriate visual skills?

So if you know children with learning disabilities, having an eye test is a great place to start, but it is very often not a great place to finish. Why leave the job half done, with all of their visual skills under developed? Why condemn them to keep struggling when, with the appropriate training program, you could see spectacular and rapid results.

The question that remains is, where do you find such a program. While there are many therapy programs available through Behavioral Optometrists, there has been nothing available until now on the internet.

Eye Health Problems Averted With This

Walt Decherd Discussions On Eye Health Problems By Kirsten Whittaker

Some very well designed and rigorous Australian research has found that to avoid eye health problems as you get older you’ll want to be eating lots of fish, olive oil and nuts, while avoiding those tasty (but troublesome) trans fats.

What these foods all have in common is they contain healthy fats, and these are thought to reduce the risk for age related macular degeneration, known as AMD.

The University of Sydney researchers found those who ate a serving of fish each week were 31% less likely to develop early AMD than those who didn’t eat fish.

A few servings of nuts per week cut the AMD risk by 35%.

A second team from the University of Melbourne found that those who consumed the most omaga-3 fatty acids were at 15% lower risk of the early stage of AMD. Those who ate at least 100 milliliters (7 tablespoons) of olive oil per week were about half as likely to develop late AMD as those who took in less than 1 mL each week.

Another important finding that came out of the Melbourne work was the role of trans fats.

Subjects who ate Trans fats regularly were 1.76 times more likely to develop late AMD during the follow up period of the study.

This isn’t the first study to suggest that omega-3 fatty acids might help to safeguard vision.

Researchers from places as far flung as Iceland and the Netherlands, as well as U.S. scientist Paul SanGiovanni with the National Eye Institute in Maryland seem to agree that omega-3 fatty acids have an impact on AMD. He believes that the healthy fats might help protect against this age related eye disease by fighting inflammation.

When you understand the mechanics of the eye, it makes sense that omega-3 fatty acids would be helpful.

Both nervous tissue and the retina have high levels of these fatty acids, especially a very beneficial one called DHA (docosahexaenoic acid).

Moving beyond the observational work that’s been done to date, San Giovanni has a clinical trial underway where subjects take omega-3 fatty acids, another compound or a placebo. Unfortunately, the results of this work won’t be available for another four years.

If you’re worried about AMD, or you have risk factors, what should you do?

“I recommend to my patients that they consume a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids and fish, especially salmon, sardines and mackerel, as well as nuts and green, leafy vegetables,” says Johanna Seddon, M.D. ScM, of the New England Eye Center and Tufts University School of Medicine. “Those not able to consume these foods should consider taking supplements containing fish oil or lutein.”

AMD is the top cause of blindness in those 65 and older. The only risk factors experts can point to for sure are a person’s age, genetics, obesity and smoking history.

This disease slowly, almost imperceptibly and without pain destroys sharp central vision, the vision you need to see things clearly, as well as for daily tasks like reading, watching TV, recognizing faces and driving.

There are two forms of AMD, wet and the more common dry and the type determines the treatment used to preserve your sight.

Recent estimates suggest that 1.75 million people have advanced AMD, and another 7.3 million remain in the early stages of the disease. Right now, treatment for AMD is limited to the latter stages.