Eye Care in Optometry

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Doctor of Optometry (O.D.) is the independent primary health care professional for the eye.  Optometrists examine, diagnose, treat, and manage diseases, injuries, and disorders of the visual system, eye and associated structures as well as identify related systemic conditions affecting the eye. Employment in optometry is projected to grow by 33 percent through 2020. Optometry also ranks at #12 on CNNMoney's list of America's 100 top jobs. They make a health assessment, offer clinical advice, prescribe spectacles or contact lenses and refer patients for further treatment, when necessary.

A recent study namely ‘Efficacy of vision therapy in children with learning disability and associated binocular vision anomalies’ was aimed to report the frequency of binocular vision (BV) anomalies in children with specific learning disorders (SLD) and to assess the efficacy of vision therapy (VT) in 94 children with a non-strabismic binocular vision anomaly (NSBVA). In result they saw Children with specific learning disorders had a high frequency of binocular vision disorders and vision therapy played a significant role in improving the BV parameters. Children with SLD should be screened for BV anomalies as it could potentially be an added hindrance to the reading difficulty in this special population.

Another study ‘Refraction during incipient presbyopia: The Aston Longitudinal Assessment of Presbyopia (ALAP) study’ revealed that the incidence of a myopic shift in refraction during incipient presbyopia did not appear to be as large as previously indicated by retrospective research. The changes in axis indicate ocular astigmatism tends towards the against-the-rule direction with age. The structural origin(s) of the reported myopic shift in refraction during incipient presbyopia warrants further investigation.

The investigation named ‘Relationship between vessel diameter and depth measurements within the limbus using ultra-high resolution optical coherence tomography’ was done. This study demonstrated that the UHR-OCT was capable of imaging morphometric characteristics such as the size and depth of vessels in the limbus. The results of this study suggest a difference in the size and depth of vessels across different positions of the limbus, which may be indicative of adaptations to chronic hypoxia caused by the covering of the superior limbus by the upper eyelid. UHR-OCT may be a useful tool to evaluate the effect of contact lenses on the microvascular properties within the limbus.

More information to optometry @Glaucoma 2018