A group of researchers, including Dr. Kristine Dalton of the School of Optometry & Vision Science, is hoping to change that. The researchers recently received funding from the National Institute of Health (NIH) for a two-year study that may be the first step toward new treatments for concussion-related vision disorders.
“Optometrists usually aren’t involved in treating patients with concussions in the acute phase,” Dalton says. “We need to be able to follow concussion patients over time to learn about the changes that occur in their visual symptoms.”
The NIH-funded study will lay the groundwork for a future five-year, multi-site study that will observe hundreds of concussion patients to see how and if their visual function and visual symptoms change over time. During the initial study, the team will see participants in order to determine the best battery of tests for use in the larger study and develop standard procedures for all participating clinic sites.
One of the key points of inquiry for the larger study will be to better understand when symptoms can be expected to go away on their own. This will give doctors a better timeline to determine when intervention may be needed.
“Right now, we don’t understand how concussion-related vision disorders change over time, which makes it hard to measure how much benefit additional vision treatments provide,” Dalton says. “This research will give us a better understanding of how these disorders progress and could one day lead to new treatment options.”
Waterloo is the only Canadian institution participating in the pilot study, which includes members from eight US institutions; Dalton serves on the project’s executive committee with Dr. Laura Purcell of McMaster University’s Department of Pediatrics, who is also the medical principal investigator at Waterloo.
While COVID-19 has pushed back the pilot project’s July 1 start date, the team is hopeful that patient recruitment can begin in the fall.