Cerebral visual impairment (CVI) is the commonest cause of impaired vision in childhood. Prematurely born children are at significant risk of damage to the brain with outcomes including cerebral palsy and low IQ.
This study presents the results of an investigation of multiple aspects of visual function in a cohort of 46 prematurely born children (<37 weeks) aged 5.5 years -12.3 years and attending mainstream education, compared with an age-matched cohort of 130 term-born children.
Fifteen of the 46 (33%) prematurely born children revealed behaviours corresponding to CVI on cluster analysis of a CVI questionnaire, a screening tool used to aid structured clinical history taking. In these children, abnormalities of stereoacuity, contrast sensitivity and eye movements were more frequent and in addition they were born 1½ weeks earlier and around 300g lighter on average than their unaffected peers. These children also performed worse than controls on all visual attention and perception tests except visual closure, while the remaining 31 prematurely born children performed no differently to controls.
This study highlights the incidence of prematurely born children with manifest CVI related difficulties. No visual perception test or routine ophthalmic test picked out those children identified with difficulties by the CVI questionnaire. The CVI questionnaire could be an effective means of identifying children at risk of CVI
