What Causes Binocular Vision Dysfunction?
Binocular vision dysfunction (BVD) is an eye muscle strain condition that can be caused by even a slight misalignment of the eyes. It can lead to a variety of unpleasant symptoms, including dizziness, headaches, anxiety, difficulty concentrating, and more. Patients with BVD are frequently misdiagnosed because these symptoms are common to other medical conditions, and standard eye exams rarely identify the misalignment.
How Does BVD Develop?
A complex process involving both your visual and neurological systems allows you to see the world around you. Your eyes must be correctly aligned to allow the brain to create a single clear image from the two images that it receives from your eyes. If your eyes aren’t aligned, the images they send to the brain are very different, because one is higher than the other.
The brain’s function is to take the two images from the eyes and convert them into one 3D image, but this is difficult when the eyes send two very different images. In order to correct the problem, the brain urges the tiny muscles in your eyes that control your eye movement to compensate for the misalignment. Correcting the misalignment is very difficult and causes strain on your eye muscles, which leads to the uncomfortable symptoms of BVD.
Symptoms of BVD include:
- Dizziness and vertigo
- Headaches
- Migraines
- Blurred vision
- Shaky vision
- Trouble focusing
- Light sensitivity
- Difficulty reading
- Anxiety, especially in crowded or large spaces
Risk Factors for BVD
The eye misalignment that causes BVD is frequently inherited. However, because eye muscles take time to reveal indications of strain, you may not notice any symptoms for years. BVD can also be acquired as a result of a stroke, a concussion or neurological disorder. People who have had sporting injuries are also more vulnerable to BVD. Asymmetry of the eyes, which causes BVD, can also result from aging.
How to Treat BVD
To help you overcome the symptoms of BVD our eye doctors will first conduct a comprehensive eye exam to assess your overall vision and then prescribe treatment that enables your eyes and brain to easily create one image.
To compensate for the eyes being misaligned, many doctors use prism lenses in glasses to bend the image your eye sees. When correctly adjusted and fitted, prisms can shift the image seen by one eye to coincide perfectly with the image seen by the other eye. This [minimizes] and often eliminates double vision and other BVD symptoms.
At we care about you and your vision. Contact us to find out more about BVD treatment and how it can alleviate your symptoms.
serves patients from Mascoutah, Belleville, O'Fallon, and Edwardsville, Illinois and surrounding communities.