Vision rehab treatment effective for stroke and injury related blindness

It is the largest neuro-visual study of its kind.

The research team found that the NeuroEyeCoach visual rehabilitation therapy applied after stroke or other traumatic brain injury (TBI) improved vision in over 80 percent of patients, helping them with everyday tasks and improving their quality of life.

The results showed that the treatment improved vision even in an 90-year-old patients.

"Up to recently, there was very little treatment available to restore vision loss in this population," said Romano, noting that while stroke and TBI patients regain some vision on their own, "very few regain it completely."

Blindness among these patients usually stems from injury to the back of the brain where images are interpreted.

This is the first time that a treatment of this kind has been shown to be effective in both old as well as young adults.

The study, which was funded by industry partner NovaVision Inc., also demonstrated that the therapy is highly beneficial to patients that state they have high levels of disability: 79 percent of these patients said they had less disability after doing NeuroEyeCoach.

"Our results show that rehabilitation of vision loss after brain injury is possible and can drastically improve patients' quality of life," said Arash Sahraie, professor and chair in Psychology at the University of Aberdeen.

"The larger scale of this study has provided answers to important questions as to whether rehabilitation outcome is affected by how old people are when they suffer their injury or how long ago they had their vision loss, or even whether they are male or female."

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Materials provided by University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.