Clinical measure of difficulties faced by children with nystagmus vs:1
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Beyond visual acuity: Development of a novel clinical test to measure one of the real-world difficulties faced by in children with nystagmus.
IRAS ID
178940
Contact name
Shinn Tan
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
REC reference, 15/LO/1483
Duration of Study in the UK
3 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
Summary of Research
Nystagmus is an eye condition characterised by uncontrolled to-and-fro movements of the eyes. We are hoping to develop a novel clinical test to measure one of the real-world difficulties faced by children in nystagmus. More specifically, we are looking into the observation that people with nystagmus take longer to process the details of their surroundings compared to normal healthy individuals. As yet there is no reliable way to measure the effect of ‘slow-to-see’ phenomenon in children. Our study seeks to address this. A measure will allow us to quantify the visual disability for children with nystagmus and to evaluate the benefits or various potential clinical and surgical interventions.
What?
We are testing a computerised preferential looking task, which seeks to test the visual processing (faces and abstract object) of children with and without nystagmus. The preferential looking task is an established method in the field of Psychology to tease out various abilities in young children who may not have the ability to understand experimental instructions.
Who?
Children under the age of 18 with nystagmus, as well as equivalent healthy control.
Where?
Paediatric clinic in the Southampton eye-unit.
How?
The child will be presented with a picture of the face of his/her mother (taken beforehand) next to the face of a female stranger on a computer screen, and the task will be to identify the photo of the mother (this should trigger a preferential looking at the mother’s face). The eye movement of the child will be tracked with a contactless eye tracker. The same experiment will also be repeated with a simpler stimuli of stripes versus homogeous area.The task will last for approximately 10 minutes.
Summary of Results
The study looked into the best clinical measurement of nystagmus and how it impacts real-world visual tasks including recognising faces and complex visual scenes. The results showed an optimum number of distractors, where faces were an excellent target in differentiating between people with nystagmus and those without (matched for age and visual acuity) and led to follow-up work developing novel visual function tests for clinical trials.
REC name
West of Scotland REC 4
REC reference
15/WS/0191
Date of REC Opinion
24 Sep 2015
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion