If a child or an adult is struggling at school or work due to ADHD and ADD, it’s important to look at functional vision problems that may be affecting their academic, social, and emotional behavioral development.
Understanding functional vision problems is important because ADHD and vision problems often result in similar symptoms, as many studies have revealed. Functional vision is about more than just having a perfect sight – it’s a set of learned and developed skills that a person uses to gather and process visual information.
A study on eye movement and ADHD by Tel Aviv University in Israel and detailed by the American Optometric Association revealed strong evidence that involuntary eye movement could be a sign of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
Researchers monitored the eye movements of two groups of adults: a group diagnosed with ADHD, and a group that served as the control group.
The first group took an ADHD diagnostic test called Test of the Variables of Attention (TOVA) twice: once without medication, and once while medicated with a drug used to treat ADHD. The participants’ eye movements were monitored by an eye-tracking system. After observing participants take the test, researchers found “a direct correlation between ADHD and the inability to control eye movement in the anticipation of visual stimuli.”
Optometry has always identified that eye movements are linked to reduced attention, which in turn can be misdiagnosed as ADHD.
The study provided conclusive evidence that eye movements are an important part of the picture, and showed that if children can control their eye movements, it would improve their attention span.
Eye movement control is a functional vision skill that includes your eyes’ ability to maintain fixation on: a moving object; from one object to another; or a stationary object.
What’s crucial about eye movement control is that it’s a foundational functional vision skill upon which other essential vision skills are built, including: eye teaming (convergence/divergence) and eye focusing (accommodation). This means that when a person has difficulty with eye movements, they may also have difficulty with other visual skills and they are addressed along with the eye movements.
Through a Functional Vision Test, a developmental optometrist can isolate the likely causes of the vision issue, and then a vision therapy plan can be established. Your developmental optometrist would set up a series of activities and exercises designed to improve the function of the entire visual system—the eyes, the brain, and the visual pathways.
Vision therapy helps people improve their visual skills, and can help ADHD patients correct the eye movements that may be contributing to the condition.
Many people take the complex and often difficult route of therapy services and/or medications that in many instances have not been as useful and beneficial.
While every case is different, in some instances, controlling eye movement could well be all that’s required to reduce ADHD-like symptoms.
Vision therapy can help give meaning to what a person hears and sees, improve reading and writing skills, rely less on movement to stay alert, sustain attention, focus better, and perform daily tasks with less strain.
At Vision Development Center of Lancaster, we are dedicated to helping both children and adults through our vision therapy program with treatments and exercises, designed to address very specific sets of vision disorders displayed by an individual patient. The program is Non-Invasive, Drug-Free and based on the world renowned Doctor Arthur Seiderman’s techniques that can truly change the life of someone with symptoms of ADD and ADHD.
If you or anyone else you know is suffering from a visual dysfunction or are looking for natural treatment for ADHD in children, we encourage you to take steps to better health and quality of life today – and avoid unnecessary medications when possible.
If you are searching for ADHD doctors in Lancaster PA, and would like to know more about the vision development and vision therapy, we invite you to call our office at (717) 656-0534 today to make an appointment, or start by taking our free symptoms survey.