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Assessment of VCCT from ophthalmology Perspective
I am a hospital based ophthalmologist and currently a professor at Northeast Ohio College of Medicine. I am also a consultant for the Neuro Rehab Unit at Mercy Medical Center. I have been frustrated over my 28 years of practice in diagnosing and monitoring patients with cerebral stroke resulting in debilitating Hemianopsia.
I am extremely excited with the research that Dr. Sadeghian has done; He has proven how to effectively rehabilitate patients with this debilitating visual handicap up to thirteen years after the fact. Such a time difference between brain injury and the total rehabilitation proves that these visual defects have not healed without treatment and are not by-products of spontaneous recovery. This treatment needs to be spread worldwide.
I am certain that Neurologist and Ophthalmologist such as myself who deal with patients with similar handicaps will be as excited as I am regarding the results that Dr. Sadeghian presents.
It's known that 5 to 10 million cases a year suffer from strokes and yet only 750,000 come to the hospital for treatment of such we predict that 10,000 patients have visual defects. This treatment provides patients with complete recovery from an incurable disease, and encourages the discussion regarding this very exciting treatment and technology.
Todd D. Fladen, MD
Medical Director Fladen Eye center
Rehabilitation of the Visual Field by using Color
The last real treatment taking care of a serious neurological condition was introduction of L-dopa in 1964 which was used in treatment of Parkinson's disease. During the last fifty years there have been tremendous achievements in diagnosis of neurological problem, from CT scan, to Functional MRI. There are a wide variety of diagnostic instruments, however the treatments have been marginal at best and there has been no real breakthrough in treatment of any of the serious neurological conditions. Visual Chromatic Cover therapy is the first real treatment for a devastating neurological condition since L-Dopa.
Hemianopia:
The condition known as Hemianopia is a type of deficit in visual field where the decreased vision or blindness takes place in half of the visual field of one or both eyes. In most cases, the visual field loss respects the vertical midline. The most common causes of this damage include stroke, brain tumor and trauma. The word Hemianopsia is from Greek origins, where: "Hemi" means "half", "an" means "without", "posit" means "seeing". Throughout the years there have been many attempts at trying to treat this condition utilizing two distinct methods: 1) Surgery or 2) different variations of re-institutive therapy, which usually consists of making modifications to different visual devices to encourage healing of the brain without using any invasive techniques. The injury caused by any of the above incidents usually leads to varying degrees of inability to see in different parts of the visual field. The mechanism of transport of information from the eye to the brain in right-hand dominant individuals is naturally designed to take images from the left side of both eyes to the right hemisphere of the brain and the right side of both eyes to the left hemisphere of the brain. Consequently, injuries in the right hemisphere of the brain cause difficulties in the left visual field of one or both eyes and injuries to left hemisphere causes difficulties in the right visual field of one or both eyes. At times the damage is not bad enough to interrupt the patient's visual abilities significantly. At other times, the deficit in the visual field is so extensive that it would cause total cutoff to half of the visual field of both eyes.
Since visual abilities are involved in many of physical and cognitive abilities of the individual, this interruption of vision could potentially affect additional abilities, creating a unique syndrome for each person. This syndrome could potentially include additional difficulties with visual memory, visual reasoning, hand-eye coordination, ambulation, visual organization, and object naming. In many cases the patient suffers from significant disabilities, permanently interfering with life. A simple example could be the person's inability to see from the left visual field. This is commonly known as left-sided neglect and it can easily prevent the person from driving, as he or she does not see incoming objects on the road. Not being able to drive would deprive the individual from many forms of employment and in the case of someone who is operating heavy machinery, he would not be able to perform his job because of the potential danger to self and others.
Current Treatment methods:
(1) Surgery: The utilization of surgery in treatment of heminapsia is quite limited and is only used in rare cases.
