Last month Dr. Ho had the opportunity to discussion vision in Parkinsons Disease (PD) on Rock Steady Boxing channel. See link below.
Rock Steady Boxing is a non-profit that helps patients with Parkinson’s disease hope by improving their quality of life through a non-contact boxing based fitness curriculum. This is a nation-wide group that optimizes agility, speed, muscular endurance, accuracy, balance, hand-eye coordination, footwork and overall strength to defend against and overcome opponents.
Dr. Ho had the opportunity to share with local trainer Colleen Bridges about common visual problems in Parkinson’s disease. This includes: reduced contrast, double vision, dry eye syndrome, depth perception difficulties, and decreased accuracy and slowing of smooth eye tracking, eye jumping, and eye teaming movements. Motion and orientation detection is impaired.
We also discussed how vision, vestibular (balance center in the ears), and proprioception (body) awareness come together for balance and orientation. Rock Steady works on the later two and Dr. Ho gave some extra tips on how to include vision in some of the exercises. This was discussed in greater detail in our previous post about Vision and Balance. These types of problems in vision in Parkinsons disease are not unique to PD, but prevalent in many other neurological disorders.
Colleen even got an opportunity to try out prism glasses to see how vision can sometimes influence balance and posture. Prism is a very powerful optical tool.
Check out the videos here: Rock Steady Nashville July Edition: Vision and PD (https://youtu.be/ZUx7EU-1Q8w)
Check out Rock Steady Boxing, Music City on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/rocksteadyboxingmusiccity/)