Eye movement deficits in ME/CFS and sleep deprivation

Not from the same study unfortunately but these recent findings of visual deficits due to sleep deprivation :

https://www.physoc.org/news_article...rived-eye-movement-test-indicates-sleep-loss/

strike me as similar, on first reading, to those found in ME/CFS (particularly with regards to tracking/smooth pursuit):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23918092

 

Interesting. It would be good to see more of this sort of stuff in ME.

 

I agree. There are some old school techniques I remember from my Psych undergrad days that might be very enlightening.

 

Weirdly, I have a chiropractor who does these tests. He has a computer program to test this.

After doing the test I had eye-muscle pain & exhaustion for two days, I never have anything like that at all, but I could only lie in bed with my eyes closed for two days.

My chiropractor usually does this test with people wit brain injury. He uses the program to slowly train people. He says my score is pretty much the same as a person with concussion, the difference is I can not do any of the training exercises without a big reaction for days, he’s never had that happening before.

Pretty much the same thing happening with all my other muscles..

 

Two points. I noticed references to these tests being used in respect to brain injury and I have a particular interest in post-concussion syndrome. Secondly I wonder is there a way of disagregating deficits due to ocular muscle fatigue from neural deficits?

 

I tried to find the full text of the 2013 study, but got this at least:

http://www.meresearch.org.uk/our-research/completed-studies/eye-movement-dysfunction/

which showed that it was a small study - 20 people per group.

 

This shows a couple of figures from the paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/pap...nson/b68db4bf0f2837767ea3f9fd4435e9f12e8faf87

and this gives a bit more info: https://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/npb/people/ch190/CFS_ME

 

I hope more research goes on eyesight. Mine's funky but all tests are clear (aside for myopia and a crapton of floaters anyway) so it looks more like it's either in image processing or maybe eye muscles. But I get a lot of weird noise, like some shimmering snow effect, as well so I doubt it's the eye only and probably mostly neural.

Focus is definitely abnormal. It's like it's readjusting itself constantly and I get weird moving smears from any source of solid light, like LEDs or stars at night.

Putting a quick example for reference in case anyone has that. The smears move, are sometimes on both eyes, sometimes only one, sometimes none. Not a well-executed rendition but the point is that lines kind of shoot out of those light sources, kinda like deforming them like the smudge tool in a graphics program.

 

The overlap in symptoms with TBI is pretty high. The connection is probably tenuous but the outcome is eerily similar.

 

Interestingly blurred peripheral vision and blurry lateral tracking is a side effect of many anti depressants.

 

That looks to me very much like the 'coma' you get in astronomical telescopes due to spherical aberrations off axis (easy for me to say ) :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coma_(optics)

Perhaps some distortion in the curvature of the cornea?

PS - I also get the snow effect - when looking at a blue sky it reminds me of an old television set not tuned in properly.

 

Thanks @MeSci for the links which led me to this study (the same researcher from the above ME/CFS study) that I don't think I've come across and is exactly the sort of thing I had in mind in mentioning psychologists (who ted to get a bad rap here but it's a very diverse field).

Restricted Spatial Windows of Visibility in Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME)

What they measured (my para breaks) :

What they found :

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/58...20.380302444.1565425979-2114889610.1565425979

This suggests to me that visual acuity (the ability to resolve fine detail) remains relatively intact in ME/CFS patients but that there is a measurable deficit in the ability to detect larger scale (lower frequency) patterns due to reduced sensitivity to contrast.

Here's an explanation as relates to visual development in infants (note the test at the end is for comprehension -not an eye test) :

https://psyc.ucalgary.ca/PACE/VA-Lab/Marcela/Pages/page35a.html

 

Just checked, and this is discussed here: https://www.s4me.info/threads/restricted-spatial-windows-of-visibility-in-me.2006/

 

Many thanks!

 

Interesting. But I doubt it's related to anything in the eye itself since it comes and goes and moves dynamically, as in looking at a LED the effect isn't fixed, the streaking moves and warps and I sometimes get pronounced double-vision for anything luminous (as in anything that doesn't produce light looks normal) but it just comes and goes as well.

I also sometimes get very blurry vision, especially when very tired, that seems to be caused by tears, blinking a few times mostly clears it up. As if my tears were more viscous than usual.

But standard eye tests are all good. I simply don't have the energy to go through the process of a thorough investigation so I just hope nothing gets too bad. It's been years already anyway so it seems stable, just annoying.

 

Rvallee, the tear film is part of the focusing system for the eye and is incredibly complex. ME is known to interfere with the tear film so that could be causing some of your problems. Dry eye can actually cause eyes to become very wet because too much of the wrong type of tear is made. If you do try eye drops get ones without preservatives and not the ones which are for making you eyeballs look whiter.

There are also lots of muscles round the eye that can move and make things blurry too.

In fact, the eye is so complicated and finely tuned that it would be surprising if it vision was not badly affected in ME. A lot of the time I feel I am not blind but I just can't see.

 

When I have PEM (not for a while now thankfully) I move my head instead of my eyes. Never really thought about why, I suppose it must be because moving my eyes becomes more effort than moving my head.

 

I was just reading this wiki page on Cortical Visual Impairment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_visual_impairment

The overlap with some of the visual problems in ME stuck me. I have no doubt that most the visual issues in M.E are due to brain/visual processing problems. I really hope this work at Leicester can be expanded. It could be so important.