Are you concerned about your children’s eye vision health?

By the Miami Lighthouse for the Blind

Do you notice your child...

• Staring toward sources of light, light-up toys, or backlit devices such as a tablet device or phone?

• Paying unusual attention to shiny, reflective, or moving objects?

• Having a delay between the time you present a toy, and the time that they are able to visually “find” that toy?

• Having difficulty finding you in a noisy, busy room or crowd--at dismissal from school or in a supermarket or even difficulty finding his or her friends during recess?

• Having difficulty visually interpreting his or her homework when presented with a visually complex textbook?

These are just some of the ways that Cortical Visual Impairment or CVI, the number one cause of pediatric visual impairment, can manifest in your child’s daily routine.

At Miami Lighthouse’s CVI Collaborative Center we are focusing on early diagnosis and early intervention for families with children with CVI for one critical reason: neuroplasticity. CVI is a brain-based visual impairment, caused by damage to the brain’s visual processing pathways before or during birth; CVI can also be acquired later in childhood, caused by head trauma or near-drowning incidents.

According to the National Eye Institute (NEI, 2020) the most common causes of CVI include:

• Lack of oxygen or blood supply to the brain — often because of a stroke

• Hydrocephalus (when fluid builds up in the brain)

• Infections that reach the brain

• Head injury

• Certain genetic conditions

With appropriate assessment and CVI-specific adaptations to learning, functional vision in children with CVI is expected to improve. For more information regarding your child’s CVI diagnosis or CVI suspicion, contact: Francesca Crozier-Fitzgerald, Director, CVI Collaborative Center: fcrozier-fitzgerald@miamilighthouse.org; 786-636-6498