2023-07-11 16:00:20
For the first National Day on Neurovisual Disorders in Children, 150 caregivers and early childhood professionals – the overwhelming majority of whom are women – met on June 16 in Paris, while more than 250 others followed the training online. organized by the association Les Yeux dans la tête.
Neurovisual disorders concern 5% of children, according to estimates taken by CNRS research director Sylvie Chokron (columnist in the “Science & Medicine” notebook), i.e. one per class on average. But they are rarely detected and often the cause of erroneous diagnoses. ” They are fallen into a clinical vacuum between ophthalmology and neurology”, she observes.
These vision disorders can affect the visual field, recognition or visual attention and memory. For example, a blind spot in the visual field combined with thousands of eye movements per minute results in a fragmented image of the world that creates difficulty in recognizing shapes, objects, faces, emotions, gestures.
The culprit is a lesion between the optic chiasma (place where the two optic nerves cross so that the right visual field is interpreted by the left cerebral hemisphere and vice versa) and the cortex. As a result, vision is affected, while the ocular apparatus − the eyes − are intact. This can lead to a situation where “the patient does not see and the doctor does not see anything”, summarizes Sylvie Chokron. In children, this lesion is often found after difficult birth conditions, for example in a context of respiratory failure or prematurity.
Learning difficulties
Knowing that 80% of the acquisition of knowledge during the first years of life relies on sight, neurovisual disorders can be at the origin or associated with other neurodevelopmental disorders related to learning difficulties, such as dyspraxia, dyslexia or dyscalculia. They can also be an early marker of autism spectrum disorders.
“Thinking about neurovisual disorders, it changes a life”insists the ophthalmologist Laurent Laloum, who recalls that visual efficiency is not a question of intelligence. “I see children in serious school failure due to neurovisual disorders, and who, when they are re-educated, learn to read in a few months! », he continues.
Also read the 2017 archive: Dyslexia nestled deep in the eyes?
This is the case of Joseph, “a great reader” now 15 years old and whose mother testifies to medical wandering: “Between his 3-4 years and his 8 years, we did four hospital departments, eight neurologists, pediatricians… and they all had different diagnoses”, says Nathalie Villeneuve. He also changed schools four times before being diagnosed with massive visual disturbances. Cared for at age 12 by Sylvie Chokron’s team, “he learned to read in eighteen months with an adapted method”says his mother.
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