Comments on: The Eyes Have It?

By: Asymmetry in Infants and the Crab Crawl

Asymmetry in Infants and the Crab Crawl — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:33:49 +0000

[...] I posted about tracking eye movements as a way to test very children for autism — and then, later in the day, read about another [...]

By: niksmom

niksmom — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 00:12:27 +0000

Beth, vision problems and AS together are not all that uncommon; my own Nikolas has both. His visual impairment is the result of retinopathy of prematurity which was surgically corrected when he was roughly 4 months old but he has scarring on his right retina. Oddly enough, he compensates really well and many people cannot tell he’s impaired except when they look at how his eyes track (don’t) together.

All that said, I do think that Nik’s VI was blamed for so many communication deficits that were/are really autism-related.

And now, we face the opposite situation— like Marla describes above; Nik makes great eye contact **sometimes** and initiates play **sometimes** but nowhere near what a typical child does and nowhere near age apporpriate playing either.

By: Marla

Marla — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:34:41 +0000

M has always had difficulty tracking. When we were trying to teach her to read the tutor realized she had no idea how to track. So, we had to being teaching her how to track dots on paper and then moved to symbols. It took weeks of practice and she would often cry because it was so difficult for her to learn.

Her eyes still seem very “shaky” to me and we have taken her to the eye doctor many times. They see glasses in her future but not just yet.

I never had any doctors take much time studying this issue with her. Most assumed since she made eye contact she was surely not Autistic. There are so many professionals out there who need education about Autism, at least that has been our finding since we had to search through so many to get one who understood Autism and even chromosome disorders.

By: Beth

Beth — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:45:28 +0000

This type of evaluation, while it may have some value, should also involve evaluation by an opthamologist, not only developmental or psychiatric doctors. One of the issues that clouded my recognizing Nicholas’ Asperger’s is that he was diagnosed as severely farsighted when he was 4. His distance vision is better than his close vision but both are pretty bad. At the time I was trying to figure out what was going on with Nicholas (socially). I asked the opthamologist if this may explain why he doesn’t really respond to my facial expressions and, while she could not answer me for certain, she said that his vision was poor enough that it was unlikely that he could make out facial expessions and that she was suprised that he could navigate the house without tripping over his toys all of the time.
While I realize that having a child with AS and vision problems is probably fairly rare, vision problems in young children are fairly under-diagnosed and this may result in some “false positives” for autism diagnoses if vision problems are not ruled out definitively in advance.