Understanding the warning signs is the first step to relief.
Binocular vision dysfunction, or BVD, occurs when your eyes are slightly misaligned, making it difficult for your brain to merge what each eye sees into one clear image. This term can apply to several conditions, including crossed eyes (strabismus) and lazy eyes (amblyopia).
While BVD can significantly impact your vision and quality of life, Beyond Vision Center has years of experience diagnosing and treating binocular vision conditions, and our trusted team is here to support our eye care patients.
BVD can be caused by facial asymmetry (often inherited), a stroke, or head and eye injuries that affect either the eye muscle or eye alignment. While BVD isn’t always preventable, taking extra precautions, such as wearing proper eye protection and protective sporting equipment, can help protect against vision dysfunction.
In other cases, BVD can develop from Lyme disease, COVID-19, or mononucleosis, all of which may interfere with binocular vision. Lastly, BVD can simply be a result of aging, as your muscles struggle to compensate for minor binocular imbalances.
While experts believe almost ten percent of the population suffers from BVD, it is frequently misdiagnosed, making it difficult to catch and treat early on. Fortunately, BVD is usually treatable regardless of your age or the cause, and our team of eye care specialists is here to help you and your binocular vision every step of the way.
While BVD can manifest in different ways, it’s always a vision-related condition. The two most common symptoms of binocular vision dysfunction are blurred vision and double vision, but a patient may also experience light sensitivity or difficulty seeing at night or while driving. Additionally, they may have trouble seeing objects up close, far away, or on a screen. These BVD challenges may also lead to eye discomfort, headaches, and even neck and shoulder pain.
However, binocular vision dysfunction symptoms may not appear immediately but rather develop gradually as binocular strain increases. Other times, BVD symptoms are triggered by specific environments or activities, such as being in a crowded place or doing homework, both of which can be overstimulating and require significant effort from your eyes and brain to see clearly.
In addition to affecting your vision and eyes, BVD can have several other significant physical effects, especially because your vision supports many of your other senses and overall visual awareness. Therefore, lightheadedness, disorientation, motion sickness, nausea, frequent falls or collisions, and dizziness are also common side effects, as BVD can impact your coordination (specifically eye coordination) and balance.
BVD can also have neurological effects, as your brain has trouble processing information correctly when binocular vision is compromised. These binocular vision dysfunction symptoms include severe migraines, nerve issues like sixth-nerve palsy, which causes double vision or blurred vision, and neurodivergent conditions like ADHD, which causes difficulty focusing.
Because BVD significantly impairs binocular vision, patients, and especially young children, often have difficulty with reading and visual learning. These symptoms may be mistaken for dyslexia or other learning disorders, but are in fact a result of BVD. Patients with BVD may struggle with reading and visual comprehension because it’s difficult to identify individual letters and numbers; words run together; they frequently lose their place on a page; skip lines; and have to reread sentences for clarity. This makes classwork extremely difficult and time-consuming, and often leads to sore eyes, headaches, and severe fatigue from binocular overexertion.
BVD, and its symptoms, can greatly affect your daily life, often causing BVD patients to change or adopt certain coping behaviors. For instance, some BVD patients may avoid reading, excessive screen time, and even maintaining eye contact with others, as these visual demands can lead to headaches and eye pain. Other BVD patients may experience anxiety in crowded public spaces or while driving, because it’s harder for them to see in these conditions. Some patients with binocular vision dysfunction may even need to squint, tilt their head, or cover one eye to see more clearly and avoid eye strain.
However, it is important to remember that patients may be affected by BVD and other types of vision dysfunction in different ways, and children and adults often have different experiences. For example, some children with BVD may have poor handwriting or need to play with their toys right in front of their faces. Regardless of your exact symptoms, if you or a loved one is struggling with binocular vision problems or experiencing other symptoms, such as headaches and migraines, our team is here to help.
Neurovisual medicine and treatment for BVD often depend on the patient and their specific binocular vision condition. Here at Beyond Vision Center, we commonly use vision therapy as a treatment method for BVD, especially if the patient is experiencing dizziness or headaches.
Vision therapy involves a series of visual activities that force the brain and eyes to work together, improving coordination and focus in the long term. As part of this BVD treatment program, our team may also recommend prism lenses. Prism lenses offer more immediate relief from symptoms by using therapeutic yoked prisms to help the brain naturally stimulate the vergence system, preventing headaches and muscle and eye strain.
Regardless of your BVD condition, your care at Beyond Vision Center will start with a neurovisual exam, which is more in-depth than a standard eye care visit and is designed to detect subtle binocular issues. Then, our team, led by vision therapy specialist Dr. Raja, will work with you to determine the best treatment plan. This may even involve small lifestyle changes, like better posture, limited screen time, visual exercises, and specific home lighting settings, as these can also help alleviate symptoms of binocular vision dysfunction, such as headaches and eye strain, while supporting other treatment methods.
If you’ve been experiencing visual difficulties or any of the symptoms mentioned above that may be related to binocular vision dysfunction, contact our office and vision therapy specialist, Dr. Raja, today. Even if you’re unsure what your symptoms mean or haven’t been experiencing them for very long, our optometrists are here to help. We will perform a BVD assessment to identify and diagnose your specific condition and create a unique eye care treatment plan for you and your lifestyle.
To learn more about BVD, or another vision dysfunction, call 760-438-2020 (Carlsbad) or 760-944-7177 (Encinitas) today. Everyone deserves clear vision!