Vision Problems For Troops With Brain Injuries

Doctor Tries To Bring Troops’ Vision Damage Into Traumatic Brain Injury Treatment Fold

Focus On Vision Problems For Troops With Brain Injuries
By LISA CHEDEKEL Courant Staff Writer
April 20, 2008
Army Staff Sgt. Brian Pearce came home from Iraq with 20/20 vision — and a diagnosis of legal blindness.

It has taken Pearce much of the last 18 months, since he arrived home on a stretcher with severe injuries from the blast of an improvised explosive device, to make sense of that paradox.

He didn't fully understand the visual consequences of his traumatic brain injury until he landed at the West Haven veterans hospital last fall, and Dr. Kara Gagnon, director of low vision optometry, laid out the problem:

"Your eyes are healthy. It's your brain that won't allow your eyes to work the right way."

Gagnon has spent the last four years trying to draw attention to the visual impairments associated with traumatic brain injury, or TBI, and Pearce is one of her success stories.

During six weeks of intensive therapy in Gagnon's clinic, Pearce, who lives in Virginia with his wife and their two young children, learned how to navigate a disjointed visual field and to compensate for his loss of peripheral vision.

"They didn't make me medically better," said Pearce, whose optic nerves were damaged when shrapnel penetrated his skull and the force of the blast jarred his brain, "but they made me functionally better."

Pearce's experience, however, is not the norm. Troops diagnosed with TBI or exposed to explosions are not routinely referred by the military or the VA for evaluations by vision specialists — something Gagnon is working to change.

Last winter, Gagnon helped to pull together military and Department of Veterans Affairs clinicians for a national summit on the visual consequences of TBI, and she is now planning a second conference in June. At the West Haven hospital, she has started a special vision clinic for veterans who have suffered brain trauma.
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