Continuum Audio Symptomatic Treatment of Neuro-ophthalmic Visual Disturbances With Dr. Sachin Kedar
Neuro-ophthalmic deficits significantly impair quality of life by limiting participation in employment, educational, and recreational activities. Low-vision occupational therapy can improve cognition and mental health by helping patients adjust to visual disturbances.
In this episode, Katie Grouse, MD, FAAN, speaks with Sachin Kedar, MD, FAAN, author of the article “Symptomatic Treatment of Neuro-ophthalmic Visual Disturbances” in the Continuum® April 2025 Neuro-ophthalmology issue.
Dr. Grouse is a Continuum® Audio interviewer and a clinical assistant professor at the University of California San Francisco in San Francisco, California.
Dr. Kedar is the Cyrus H Stoner professor of ophthalmology and a professor of neurology at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia.
Additional Resources
Read the article: Symptomatic Treatment of Neuro-ophthalmic Visual Disturbances
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Full episode transcript available here
Dr Jones: This is Dr Lyell Jones, Editor-in-Chief of Continuum. Thank you for listening to Continuum Audio. Be sure to visit the links in the episode notes for information about earning CME, subscribing to the journal, and exclusive access to interviews not featured on the podcast.
Dr Grouse: This is Dr Katie Grouse. Today I'm interviewing Dr Sachin Kedar about his article on symptomatic treatment of neuro-ophthalmic visual disturbances, which appears in the April 2025 Continuum issue on neuro-ophthalmology. Welcome to the podcast, and please introduce yourself to our audience.
Dr Kedar: Thank you, Katie. This is Sachin Kedar. I'm a neuro-ophthalmologist at Emory University, and I've been doing this for more than fifteen years now. I trained in both neurology and ophthalmology, with a fellowship in neuro-ophthalmology in between. It's a pleasure to be here.
Dr Grouse: Well, we are so happy to have you, and I'm just so excited to be discussing this article with you, which I found to be a real treasure trove of useful clinical information on a topic that many find isn't covered enough in their neurologic training. I strongly recommend all of our listeners who work with patients with visual disturbances to check this out. I wanted to start by asking you what you hope will be the main takeaway from this article for our listeners?
Dr Kedar: The most important takeaway from this article is, just keep vision on your radar when you are evaluating your patients with neurological disorders. Have a list of a few symptoms, do a basic screening vision, and ask patients about how their vision is impacting the quality of life. Things like activities of daily living, hobbies, whether they can cook, dress, ambulate, drive, read, interact with others. It is very important for us to do so because vision can be impacted by a lot of neurological diseases.
Dr Grouse: What in the article do you think would come as the biggest surprise to our listeners?
Dr Kedar: The fact that impairment of vision can magnify and amplify neurological deficits in a lot of what we think of as core neurological disorders should come as a surprise to most of the audience.
Dr Grouse: On that note, I think it's probably helpful if you could remind us about the types of visual disturbances we should be thinking about and screening for in our patients?
Dr Kedar: Patients who have neurological diseases can have a whole host of visual deficits. The simplest ones are deficits of central vision. They can have problems with their visual field. They can have abnormalities of color vision or even contrast sensitivity. A lot of our patients also complain of light sensitivity, eyes feeling tired when they're doing their usual stuff. Some of our patients can have double vision, they can have shaky vision, which leads to their sense of imbalance and maybe a fall risk to them.
Dr Grouse: It's really helpful to think about all the different aspects in which vision can be affected, not just sort of the classic loss of vision. Now, your article also serves as a really important reminder, which you alluded to earlier, about how impactful visual disturbances can be on daily activities. Could you elaborate a little further on this, and particularly the various domains that can be affected when there are visual disturbances present?
Dr Kedar: So, when I look at how visual disturbances affect quality of life, I look at two broad categories. One is activities of basic daily living. These would be things like, are you able to cook? Are you able to ambulate not just in your home, but in your neighborhood? Are you able to drive to your doctor's appointment or to visit with your family? Are you able to dress yourself appropriately? Are you able to visualize the clothing and choose them appropriately? And then the second category is recreational activities. Are you able to read? Are you able to watch television? Are you able to visit the theatre? Are you able to travel? Are you able to participate in group activities, be it with your family or be it with your social group? It is very important for us to ask our patients if they have problems doing any of this because it really can adversely impact the quality of life.
Dr Grouse: I think, certainly with all the things we try to get through talking with our patients, this may not be something that we do spend a lot of time on. So, I think it's it is a good reminder that when we can, being able to ask about these are going to be really important and help us hit on a lot of other things we may not even realize or know to ask about. Now, I was really struck when I was reading your article by the meta-analysis that you had quoted that had showed 47% higher risk of developing dementia among the visually impaired compared to those without visual impairments. Should we be doing more in-depth visual testing on all of our patients with cognitive symptoms?
Dr Kedar: This is actually the most interesting part of this article, and kind of hones in on the importance of vision in neurological disorders. Now I want to clarify that patients with visual disorders, it's not a causative influence on dementia, but if you have a patient with an underlying cognitive disorder, any kind of visual disturbance will significantly make it worse. And this has been shown in several studies, both in the neurologic and in the ophthalmological literature. So, I quoted one of the big meta-analysis over there, but studies have clearly shown that if you have these patients and treat them for their visual deficits, their cognitive indices can actually significantly improve.
To answer your question, I would say a neurologist should include basic vision screening as part of every single evaluation. Now, I know it's a hard thing in, you know, these days when we are literally running on the hamster wheel, but I can assure you that it won't take you more than 2 to 3 minutes of your time to do this basic screening; in fact, you can have one of your assistants included as part of the vital signs assessment. What are these basic screening tools? Measure the visual acuity for both near and distance. Check and see if their visual field’s off with the confrontation. Look at their eye movements. Are they able to move their eyes in all directions? Are the eyes stable when they're trying to fixate on a particular point? I think if you can do these basic things, you will have achieved quite a bit.
Dr Grouse: That's really helpful, and thanks for going through some of the standard, or really, you know, solid basic foundation of visual testing we should be thinking about doing. I wanted to move on to some more details about the visual disturbances. You made an excellent point that there are many types of primary ophthalmologic conditions that can cause visual disturbances that we should keep in mind. So maybe not things that we think about a lot on a day-to-day basis, but, you know, are still there and very common. What are some of the most common ones, and when should we be referring them to see an ophthalmologist?
Dr Kedar: So, it depends on the age group of your patient population. Now, the majority of us are adult neurologists, and so the kinds of ophthalmic conditions that we see in this population is going to be different from the pediatric age group. So in the adult population, we might see patients with uncorrected refractive error, presbyopia, patients who have cataracts creep on them, they may have glaucoma, they may have macular degeneration, and these tend to have a slightly higher incidence in the older age group. Now for those of us who are taking care of the younger population, uncorrected refractive errors, strabismus and amblyopia tend to be fairly common causes of visual deprivation in this age group.
What I would encourage all of our neurologists is, make sure that your patients get a basic eye examination at least once a year. Just like you want them to go to their primary care and get an annual maintenance visit, everybody should go to the ophthalmologist or the optometrist and get a basic examination. And, if you're resourceful enough, have your patients bring a copy of that assessment. Whether it is normal or there's some abnormality, it is going to help you in the management.
Dr Grouse: Absolutely. I think that's a great piece of advice, to think of it almost, like, them seeing their primary care doctor, which of course we offer encourage our patients to do, thinking of this as another very important piece of standard primary care. If a patient comes to you reporting difficulty reading due to possible visual disturbances, I'm curious, can you walk us through how you would approach this evaluation?
Dr Kedar: It is not a very common presenting complaint of our patients, even in the neuro-ophthalmology clinic. It's a very rare patient that I see who comes and says, I cannot read or, I have difficulty reading. Most of the patients will come saying, oh, I cannot see. And then you have to dig in to find out, what does that actually mean? What can you not see? Is it a problem in your driving? Is it a problem in your reading? Or is it a problem that occurs at all times? Now you asked me, how do you approach this evaluation? One of the things that all of us, whether we are neurologists, ophthalmologists, or neuro-ophthalmologists, forget to do is to actually have the patient read a paragraph, a sentence, when they are in clinic. And that will give you a lot of ideas about what might actually be going wrong with the patient.
Now, as far as how do I approach this evaluation, I will do a basic screening examination to make sure that their visual acuity is good for both distance and near. A lot of us tend to do either distance or near and we will miss the other parameter. You want to do a basic confrontation visual field to make sure that they do not have any subtle deficits that's impacting their ability to read. Examine the eye movements, do a fundoscopic examination. Now, once you've done this basic screening, as a neurologist, you already have some idea of whether your patient has a lesion along the visual pathways. If you suspect that this is a problem with, say, the visual pathways, ask your ophthalmology colleague to do a formal visual field assessment, and that'll pick up subtle deficits of central visual field.
And lastly, don't forget higher visual function testing or cortical visual function testing. So basically, you're looking for neglect, phenomenon, or simultanagnosia, all of which tends to have an impact on reading. So, in the manuscript I have a schema of how you can approach a patient with reading difficulties, and in that ischemia you will see categories of where things can go wrong during the process of reading. And if you can approach your patient systematically through one of those domains, there's a fairly good chance that you'll be able to pick up a problem.
Dr Grouse: Going a little further on to when you do identify problems with loss of central or peripheral vision, what are some strategies for symptomatic management of these types of visual disturbances?
Dr Kedar: As a neurologist, if you pick up a problem with the vision, you have to send this patient to an eye care provider. The vast majority of people who have visual disturbances, it’s from an eye disease. You know, as I alluded to earlier, it can be something as simple as uncorrected refractive error, and that can be fixed easily. A lot of patients in our older age group will have dry eye syndrome, which means they are unable to adequately lubricate the surface of the eye, and as a result, it degrades the quality of their vision. So, they tend to get intermittent episodes of blurred vision, or they tend to get glare. They tend to get various forms of optical aberration. Patients can have cataracts, patients can have glaucoma or macular degeneration. And in all of those instances, the goal is to treat the underlying disease, optimize the vision, and then see what the residual deficit is. By and large, if a patient has a problem with the central vision, then magnification will help them for activities that they perform at near; say, reading.
Now for patients with peripheral vision problem, it's a different entity altogether. Again, once you've identified what the underlying cause is, your first goal is to treat it. So, for example, if your patient has glaucoma, which is affecting peripheral vision, you're going to treat glaucoma to make sure that the visual field does not progress. Now a lot of what happens after that is rehabilitation, and that is always geared towards the specific activities that are affected. Is it reading? Is it ambulating? Is it watching television? Is it driving? And then you can advise as a neurologist, you can advise your occupational therapist or low vision specialist and say, hey, my patient is not able to do this particular activity. Can we help them?
Dr Grouse: Moving on from that, I wanted to also hit on your approach when patients have disorders of ocular motility. What are some things you can do for symptomatic management of that?
Dr Kedar: So, patients with ocular motility can have two separate symptoms. Two, you know, two disabling symptoms, as they would call it. One is double vision and the other is oscillopsia, or the feeling or the visualization of the environment moving in response to your eyes not being able to stay still. Typically, you would see this in nystagmus. Now, let's start with diplopia. Diplopia is a fairly common presenting complaint for neurologists, ophthalmologists, and the neuro-ophthalmologist. The first aspect in the management of diplopia is to differentiate between monocular diplopia and binocular diplopia. Now, monocular diplopia is when the double vision persists even after covering one eye. And that is never a neurological issue. It's almost always an ophthalmic problem, which means the patient will then have to be assessed by an eye care provider to identify what's causing it. And again, refractive error, cataracts, opacities, they can do it.
Now, if the patient is able to see single vision by covering one eye at a time, that's binocular diplopia. Now, in patients with binocular diplopia in the very early stages of the disease, the standard treatment regimen is just monocular occlusion. Cover one eye, the diplopia goes away, and then give it time to improve on its own. So, this is what we would typically do in a patient with, say, acute sixth nerve palsy or fourth nerve palsy or third nerve palsy, maybe expect spontaneous improvement in a few months. Now if the double vision does not improve and persists long term, then the neuro-ophthalmologist or the ophthalmologist will monitor the amount of deviation to see if it fluctuates or if it stays the same. So, what are the treatment options that we have in a patient who absolutely refuses any intervention or is not a candidate for any intervention? Monocular occlusion still remains the viable option. Now, patients who have stable ocular deviation can benefit from using prisms in their glasses, or they can be sent to a surgeon to have a strabismus surgery that can realign their eyes. So, again, a broad answer, but there are options available that we can use.
Dr Grouse: Thank you for that overview. I think that's just really helpful to keep in mind as we're working with these patients and thinking about what their options are. And then finally, I wanted to touch on patients with higher-order vision processing and attention difficulties. What are some strategies for them?
Dr Kedar: These are frankly the most difficult patients that I get to manage in my clinic, simply because there is no effective therapies for managing them. In fact, I think neurologists are far better at this than ophthalmologists or even neuro-ophthalmologists. In patients with attentional disorders, everything boils down to the underlying cause, whether you can treat it or whether it is a slowly progressive, you know, condition, such as from neurodegenerative diseases. And that tailors our goals towards therapy. The primary goal is for safety. A lot of these patients who have visual disturbances from vision processing or attention, they are at accident and fall risk. They have problems with social interactions. And, importantly, there is a gap of understanding of what's going on, not just from their side but also from the family’s side. So, I tend to approach these patients from a safety perspective and social interaction perspective.
Now, I have a table listed in the manuscript which will go into details of what the specific things are. But in a nutshell, if your patient has neglect in a specific part of the visual field, they have accident risk on that side. Simple things like walking through a doorway, they can hurt their shoulders or their knees when they bang into the wall on that side because they are unable to judge what's on the other side. Another example would be a patient who has simultanagnosia or a downgaze policy, such as from progressive super nuclear policy. They are unable to look down fast enough, or they are simply unable to look down and appreciate things that are on the floor, and so they can trip and fall. Walking downstairs is also not a huge risk because they are unable to judge distances as they walk down. A lot of what we see in these patients are things that we have to advise occupational therapists and help them improve these safety parameters at home.
Another thing that we often forget is patients can inadvertently cause a social incident when they tend to ignore people on their affected side. So, if there is a family gathering, they tend to consistently ignore a group of people who are sitting on the affected side as opposed to the other side. And I've had more than a few patients who've come and said that, I may have offended some of my friends and family. In those instances, it's always helpful when they are in clinic to demonstrate to the family how this can be awkward and how this can be mitigated. So, having everybody sit on one side is a useful strategy. Advise your family and friends before a gathering that, hey, this may happen. And it is not because it is deliberate, but it's because of the medical condition. And that goes a lot, you know, further in helping our patients come out of social isolation because they are also afraid of offending people, you know. And they can also participate socially, and it can overall improve their quality of life.
Dr Grouse: That's a really helpful tip, and something I'll keep in mind with my patients with neglect and visual field cuts. Thank you so much for coming to talk with us today. Your article has been so helpful, and I urge everybody listening today to take a look.
Dr Kedar: Thank you, Katie. It was wonderful talking to you.
Dr Grouse: I've been interviewing Dr Sachin Kedar about his article on symptomatic treatment of neuro-ophthalmic visual disturbances, which appears in the most recent issue of Continuum on neuro-ophthalmology. Be sure to check out Continuum Audio episodes from this and other issues. And thank you to our listeners for joining today.
Dr Monteith: This is Dr Teshamae Monteith, Associate Editor of Continuum Audio. If you've enjoyed this episode, you'll love the journal, which is full of in-depth and clinically relevant information important for neurology practitioners. Use the link in the episode notes to learn more and subscribe. AAN members, you can get CME for listening to this interview by completing the evaluation at continpub.com/audioCME. Thank you for listening to Continuum Audio.