ClinicSpeak: visual function survey

We need to empower you with a tools to assess your optic nerve function. #ClinicSpeak #MSBlog

"Thank you for completing the online survey about visual function. I have now had enough responses over the last 2 days to realise that most of you don't know whether, or not, your MS has affected your visual function, nor have you been told by your neurologist if there are telltale signs of subclinical optic nerve involvement. You may be aware that over 50% of MSers will have optic neuritis at some stage in the course of their disease and when you interrogate optic nerve function about two-thirds of MSers have evidence of involvement of the optic nerves. The reason why some of you don't have any visual symptoms is that the visual system and brain are very good at adapting to damage. This is due to the so called reserve capacity that we all have in our neuronal pathways. The problems only really arise when this reserve is lost or you stress the visual system (colour, contrast, depth perception tasks) that you realise you have a problem."

"What is clear from some of the responses is that there is a need for an online tool or smartphone APP so that you can self assess your visual function. This is important for us as it will make our online webEDSS more accurate. A quick search reveals many online testing tools and smartphone APPs for visual function. However, before recommending any of them to you we need to validate and assess how good they are. I have therefore asked a medical student, as a research project, to help me with this task. Once we have reviewed the different tools we will make a recommendation. Ideally, it would be great if we could make our own tool, as part of our suite of ClinicSpeak Apps, that fed directly into our webEDSS app. As always this will require time, energy and probably a grant application to fund the APP and its validation."

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