Can brain-injured, partially-blind stroke patients regain some of their lost vision?

Sep 5 2007

Is it possible to offer hope for stroke patients who've lose part of their vision?

A study published by SAGE in the journal Neurorehabilitation & Neural Repair explores that question.

The researchers studied visual restoration therapy for stroke patients, hypothesizing that the training would induce specific changes in the brain's response to stimuli, something demonstrated in animal experiments but never in humans with brain injury. The home-based therapy used repetitive stimulation of the zones adjacent to the blind area to modestly enlarge the field of vision of patients who had lost the ability to see off to the left or right in each eye.

“Our goal in this study was to determine whether therapy would produce a unique alteration in the brain's response to stimuli in the trained border-zone location compared with the non-trained portion of the seeing field,” write the authors in the article. They concluded that, “visual restoration therapy seems to alter brain activity. Demonstration of a visual field–specific training effect on brain activity provides an important starting point for understanding the potential for visual therapy in partially-blind stroke patients.”