Amercian Heart Association "Million Hearts Initiative"

The AHA has just published its intention to prevent a million strokes and heart attacks over the next 5 years. They say "Effective community CVD prevention interventions have been underutilized due to a lack of a coordinated national effort". This initiative is aimed at changing that. Click Here to visit the related AHA Science News page.

Prisms for hemianopia

Here is a video posted on YouTube by Chadwick Optical, makers of prisms stuck onto glasses to treat hemianopia. These prisms bring part of the blind visual field into the seeing field. They were developed by Eli Peli, Professor of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School. He describes how it works in this paper. Like most hemianopia rehabilitation strategies this method has not been clearly proven in a clinical trial, but there is some supporting scientific evidence.

There are a couple more videos on Chadwick Optical's YouTube channel here.

Interact Reading Service

A short video about the UK Guardian Charity Award winning reading service for stroke patients, Interact Reading Service.

Guardian Charity Award 2009-InterAct Reading Service from InterAct Reading Service on Vimeo.

Self-help for one-side neglect

This short article from the American Stroke Association gives advice about how to help people with neglect following stroke to adapt to their difficulties.

Click here to read the article

ReadRight rehabilitation for hemianopic alexia

Click for a 3 minute YouTube video about ReadRight web-based rehabilitation for hemianopic alexia (from University College London and the UK Stroke Association).

New Studies on Hemianopia and Driving

2 studies about driving with hemianopia / quadrantanopia have just been published by Cynthia Owsley's group in Birmingham, Alabama.

The first, "Self-reported driving difficulty by persons with hemianopia and quadrantanopia", published in Current Eye Research (Link to PubMed) found that people with hemianopia / quadrantanopia who were unsafe to drive didn't report any more difficulty driving than those rated safe (both reported more difficulty than people with normal visual fields).

The second, "Hemianopic and quadrantanopic field loss, eye and head movements, and driving", published in Investigative Ophthalmology and Vision Science (Link to PubMed) found that people with hemianopia / quadrantanopia rated as safe to drive made more head movements into their blind field, with more stable lane keeping and less sudden braking. The authors suggest clinical trials training these characteristics. Perhaps they'll run one. Watch this space!

Visual impairment is more than just vision

2 interesting studies published recently show that limitations experienced by visually impaired adults are not all about visual ability.

The first, by Alma and others (Quality of Life Research, June 2011) found that social participation in visually impaired older adults was not determined by visual ability, but rather by age, physical fitness, helplessness, social network size, and how important people viewed participation in particular activities.

The second, by Tabrett and Lathem (Investigative Ophthalmology and Vision Science, May 2011) looked at limitation in daily activities relying on vision. They found that self-reported limitation was affected by visual acuity, but also significantly by depression and adjustment to vision loss.

For people working with visually impaired adults this is a helpful reminder that we need to look at more than how good their vision is!