Objectives: Visual impairment in older adults may increase risk for depression and suicide. Research suggests that giving support to others may be associated with lower depressive symptoms in older adults, but much of the research has been in non-clinical populations. Furthermore, there is limited research on giving support and suicide risk.Methods: Using a sample of older adults with vision-related diagnoses (N = 101), this study investigated the association between informal support giving (unpaid support given to family, friends, or neighbors) and formal support giving (volunteering) on depressive symptoms and suicidal ideation. Linear regressions examined the relation between support giving and depression, and logistic regressions examined the relation between support giving and suicidal ideation.Results: Greater informal support giving was related to lower likelihood of reported suicidal ideation (OR: .82, 95% CI: .68-.99, p = .04), whereas volunteer activity was not significantly related to suicidal ideation. Neither volunteer behavior nor informal support giving was related to depressive symptoms.Conclusions: Providing informal support was associated with lower likelihood of endorsing suicidal ideation in older adults with vision impairment.Clinical Implications: Informal support giving may be a target for decreasing suicidal ideation among older adults with health impairments.
To compare the visual evoked potential (VEP) responses of amblyopic eyes with VEP responses of sound eyes in amblyopic children. A study of 65 amblyopic children with pattern-reversal VEPs elicited by checkerboard stimuli with large, medium and small checks. The children were classified into three groups: Group A, 22 children with anisometropic amblyopia; Group B, 16 children with exotropic strabismic amblyopia; and Group C, 27 children with esotropic strabismic amblyopia. Visual acuity (VA) was significantly worse in the amblyopic eye as compared to the sound eye. However, no statistically significant difference was found between the amblyopic and sound eye of amblyopic children in the three groups for VEP P1 amplitude and latencies for any check sizes. VEP is a very important tool in understanding the complex amblyopic mechanism. Although the sound eye has superior VA, the absence of differences in VEP P1 amplitudes and latencies demonstrate the functional abnormality of the eye considered 'good'. More studies are necessary to explain why the sound eye in amblyopic children cannot be considered completely normal. Special attention should therefore be paid to amblyopic treatment, as patching can have a negative effect on the sound eye.
Abstract Several studies have indicated that contrast-dependent tasks, such as detecting threshold stimuli, may be more effective in discriminating glaucoma from normal groups if external noise is added to the stimulus. We sought to determine if the same were true for contrast-independent tasks. Subjects were 15 patients with glaucoma and a group of 20 normals with the same mean age. We employed two contrast-independent tasks, orientation defined texture and dot numerosity discrimination. The stimulus was presented on a computer controlled video monitor. One side of the display contained a standard and the other contained a non-standard target. For each task, noise was added by perturbing the main feature of the display, dot number or line orientation, by a Gaussian distribution truncated at 2 standard deviation units. There were four noise levels for each task. Subjects viewed the stimulus display and made a spatial two-alternative forced choice judgment. Subjects judged the side of the orientation texture which contained a sub-region with a different angle and the side of the dot figures which had the larger number of dots. Glaucoma patients performed more poorly than normals in discriminating the orientation texture (p < 0.05) and in judging dot numerosity (p < 0.05). This was true even in the absence of added external noise. Adding external noise did not increase the differences between glaucoma patients and normals. Unlike contrast-dependent tasks in which the differences between normal and glaucoma patients are increased when external noise is added, contrast-independent tasks show maximal differentiation between the two groups without added noise. Tasks such as texture discrimination and dot numerosity may be useful in detecting glaucoma. Acknowledgment This work is supported in part by US Air Force Contract #F41624-92-D-40001 and Grant R03 EY 14841 from the National Eye Institute.
This article is a summary of the available literature on ocular symptoms due to systemic exposure to mercury. Mercury compounds are first described in terms of their different forms, industrial applications, mechanisms and routes of exposure, toxicity levels, and treatment methods. Eye symptoms are then characterized for organic and inorganic forms of mercury by using the form of various documented case studies of chronic and acute exposure to various mercury compounds.
The field of electrodiagnostics is rapidly expanding. Improved computing power has expanded our ability to control stimuli and to analyze the biologic signals elicited by them. Similar trends are also affecting other areas ranging from biochemistry and genetics to imaging of the retina and brain. Natural, fertile areas of study are the overlap of these factors. Thus, we had invited papers by Aina Puce and Paul Sieving directed toward structure and function relationships in the cortex and retina. Additionally, we had several sessions related to imaging and electrophysiology.
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