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What does "blurry vision" really mean after stroke? - The Stroke Blog
Visual symptoms are very common following both ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke. These complaints have a tendency to receive the label “blurred” or “blurry” by both patients and healthcare providers, but an important part of accurate diagnosis and increasing the chance of improving these symptoms for the patient involves understanding what the problem is. Not all “blurry” vision after a stroke is actually “blurry”! Over time, I have found that visual deficits following a substantial brain injury tend to fall into one of the following categories. While scores of neurological conditions can result in these visual syndromes, for our purposes we will keep the focus on stroke. Diplopia, or double vision, occurs when more than one image of an object is being visualized by the patient. This occurs most commonly because the eyes are not aligning properly to fixate on a visual target, and as a result of failing to converge at a specific point, mixed visual information is presented to the brain. When a patient has experienced a stroke, most often I find that the injury was in the brainstem, as there are centers controlling eye movements in this location. Double vision can also occur if there is an injury […]
Jodi Gehring, MD