What is "cross-eyed"? How to treat it

Now is a good time for traveling and spring outings, with grass growing and birds singing and flowers blooming. Children are having a great time, making funny faces and making parents laugh. But sometimes, they are not teasing you. For example, a child's "cross-eyed"...

Dai Hongbin

Chief Physician

Standing Committee Member of the TCM Ophthalmology Committee of Hubei Provincial Association of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Deputy Director of the Strabismus and Pediatric Ophthalmology Group of Aier Eye Hospital Group

Director of Strabismus and Pediatric Ophthalmology Department, Aier Eye Hospital, Wuhan University

Expertise: various types of strabismus surgery and posterior scleral reinforcement surgery, adolescent myopia prevention and control, amblyopia diagnosis and treatment, difficult optometry problems and other pediatric ophthalmological eye diseases.

01 What is strabismus?

Symptoms such as "squinting eyes", "crossed eyes" and "crossed eyes" are likely to be a common childhood eye disease - strabismus, which means that the lines of sight of the two eyes are not parallel.

Director Dai Hongbin introduced that when the cerebral cortex center that manages the coordinated movement of the two eyes is out of order, the strength of the extraocular muscles is unbalanced and the two eyes cannot focus on the same target. When one eye looks at an object, the other eye deviates, which is strabismus.

02 Specific manifestations of strabismus

In daily life, strabismus patients usually experience one or more of the following similar symptoms:

1. After reading for a long time, children will feel that the handwriting is blurred or stacked or serialized, and sometimes they may have intermittent diplopia or intermittent strabismus. If they read with one eye, they will feel that the handwriting is clear and effortless, and even binocular vision disorder may occur.

2. Poor stereoscopic perception, unable to accurately determine the position and distance of objects in space. Heteroplasia can also present neurological radiation symptoms, such as disgust, vomiting, insomnia, conjunctival and eyelid congestion, etc.

3. After looking for a long time, children often experience symptoms such as headache, eye pain, photophobia, etc. This is because the long-term use of neuromuscular storage power induces eye fatigue.

03 What are the dangers of strabismus?

If you find your child has strabismus, don’t take it lightly, as these hazards may occur:

1. It affects the appearance, and more importantly, it affects the normal development of vision and binocular vision. In severe cases, the patient may not have good stereoscopic vision, and will only see things on a flat surface without a sense of depth and distance, which will affect delicate work such as drawing.

2. Most strabismus patients may have amblyopia. Since strabismus patients focus on one eye for a long time, the other eye is likely to suffer from disuse vision loss or arrested development.

3. Some children with strabismus often use special head positions such as tilting the head or turning the face to the side to overcome the discomfort when seeing things. If not corrected early, it may lead to scoliosis and other conditions.

04 How to treat strabismus

Some strabismus can be corrected by wearing glasses, which can correct the eye position by wearing suitable glasses; severe cases require surgical treatment to adjust the strength of the extraocular muscles and the position of the attachment points to restore the eye position to normal.

Timely treatment of children's eye diseases is the most important. Director Dai Hongbin reminded that if parents want to protect their children's eyes and let them grow up healthily, they should pay more attention to observe whether their children have abnormal eye habits. In addition, they should go to professional ophthalmology hospitals regularly for medical optometry to detect eye diseases early.