Vision Therapy Rehabilitation of Post-Concussion Visual Impairments

Concussion is a common, mild form of traumatic brain injury that is caused by blunt force trauma to the head. Concussion can be caused by a wide variety of situation, commonly sports collisions, automobile accidents, and falls. Signs of concussion include a loss of consciousness, temporary amnesia, and disorientation. Severe concussion can result in visual impairments such as blurred vision, light sensitivity, attention deficits, impaired memory, and double vision. Vision therapy can significantly or completely improve many of these visual impairments. Vision therapy is a series of procedures monitored by an optometrist that are designed to improve visual movements and processing. Vision therapy can be used to benefit patients in many different situations from sports vision training and learning disability improvements to traumatic brain injury rehabilitation and specific visual condition correction. Many or all of the visual symptoms of concussion respond to vision therapy; vision therapy programs for concussion typically focus on correcting convergence insufficiency, eye movements, visual tracking, and gaze stabilization. The case study included at the end of this research presents the use of vision therapy for the management of post-concussion visual symptoms in a 20 year old male athlete.