Use of ready-made spectacles to meet visual needs in a low-resource adult population.

Purpose: In affluent societies, distance and near vision problems are typically corrected with custom-made eyeglasses. Many persons in less affluent areas do not have the resources for such. The purpose of this study was to assess the use of less expensive ready-made (RM) bifocals and readers to correct distance and near refractive error and presbyopia in an outreach clinic in Nicaragua.

Sleep apnea syndrome represents a risk for glaucoma in a veterans' affairs population.

Purpose. To determine whether the diagnosis of sleep apnea syndrome (SAS) represents a risk-factor for glaucoma. Design.

Visually impaired caregivers: perspectives from patient focus groups.

Background: With the aging of the population, more persons who are severely visually impaired are now caring for a spouse or significant other. The purpose of this qualitative study is to learn more about this previously unreported, yet vulnerable, population of visually impaired caregivers.

Methods: Focus groups and 1-on-1 interviews were conducted with legally blind U.

Health-related quality of life following blind rehabilitation.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of residential blind rehabilitation on patients' vision-targeted health-related quality of life (HRQOL) and general physical and mental function.

Method: The National Eye Institute 25-item Visual Function Questionnaire (NEI VFQ) plus appendix questions, the 12-item Short-Form Health Survey (SF-12), Hope Scale and Coopersmith self-esteem inventory were administered to 206 legally blind veterans prior to their entering a residential (in-patient) blind rehabilitation program and again to 185 and 176 of the original cohort at 2 and 6 months after completion of the rehabilitation program, respectively. Data on visual acuity, visual field extent, contrast sensitivity and scanning ability were also collected.

Visual search training in subjects with severe to profound low vision.

Effects of practicing on feature search tasks (a 2 degrees square target amid 1 degrees square distracters) for 5 days were compared between 45 visually impaired (VI) subjects with severe to profound low vision and 23 age-matched normal controls (NV). Search accuracy and speed improved in both groups. VI subjects had larger training gains than NV subjects, but their proportional gains were similar to that of NV subjects.

Relationships between feature search and mobility performance in persons with severe visual impairment.

Purpose: Because visual search requires both the ability to discriminate visual features and the ability to process information in a large field of view, the association between feature search and mobility of visually impaired (VI) subjects was studied.

Methods: Forty-four subjects with severe visual impairment participated in the study. Feature search performance (2 x 2 deg square target amid 1 x 1 deg square distracters) was measured for 8- to 16- and 32-item set-sizes on 10 x 10, 20 x 20, and 40 x 40 deg fields.

Influence of reference frames on asymmetries in Troxler's effect.

In 1804, Troxier discovered that, when an observer fixates on a point in central vision and attends to a peripheral stationary stimulus, the peripheral stimulus eventually fades from awareness. This phenomenon is known as Troxler's effect and is allegedly influenced by spatial attention. Asymmetries in Troxler's effect along horizontal and vertical meridian were a recent discovery.