Increased Vulnerability to Pattern-Related Visual Stress in Myalgic Encephalomyelitis

[Rooney]

@Forbin wow. thank you for posting this. i have real trouble finding sun glasses that don't make my brain and vision go wacky. so this must be why. thank you for writing this!

Me too! I just thought the sunglasses were cheaply made and returned them.

 

[jimells]

Wow. This is interesting. I can do polarized sun glasses OK. But there are very few TV programs that I can watch. The shaky-cam and fast-edit garbage makes my head hurt and causes anxiety. The TV program promos are the absolute worst. I have to look away or change the channel to one of the other three that I can receive over the air.

 

[maryb]

Me too @jimells ... I didn't realise so many people were affected, definitely an indicator for more research.

 

[Never Give Up]

The University of Leicester has news a release with some background information and author quotes here:

http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=158761&CultureCode=en

@Forbin, when my son's light sensitivity first compelled a sunglasses purchase, the Polaroid lense intolerance was hard to miss.

He also does this thing where he wiggles his eyes back and forth very fast, says he is often working to not do it. Doing it provides some kind of relief. Anyone else have this?

 

[OverTheHills]

Interesting. I've experienced a lot of visual problems which are no doubt related to dizziness, but more specifically to the two eyes not working together - both on a physical level and on the level where the left and right images are "fused" in the brain (which could account for the distortions described in the abstract above).

One effect of this difficulty is an intolerance for polarized glasses (or polarized sunglasses), due to the fact that the polarization creates a slightly different pattern of "brightness" and "highlights" for each eye which the brain must then try to combine (just as it has to "fuse" the left and right images from the eyes into a single 3D view.)

Just curious if anyone else has ever noticed such an intolerance for polarized glasses?

Yes. I have been having a problem with my new prescription sunglasses (two for the price of one offer) - get a migraine every time I wear them even for a short period of time. When I wear the untinted (same prescription) pair no problem. Just tested the sunglasses and they are polarised. Never used to have a problem with polarised glasses but that may have been before/early days of ME.

Thank you to everyone for this thread. It has been a difficult process trying to work out what is going on and a lot of the experiments have resulted in a two day migraine, but with the hypothesis of polarised lens problem rather than new prescription problem things became a lot clearer. (sorry for pun)
OTH

 

[Mark]

I met Dr Hutchinson briefly at the Invest in ME conference. I personally found her presentation the most interesting one of the conference. There was a lot of great competition of course, but this angle of research seems to me like something quite new and different - this looks to me like a very clear, simple and objectively demonstrable symptom, so I think there is a lot of potential here. I was hoping to organise a follow-up article quite quickly, but haven't managed to find the time, until now...I've now emailed her, at last, so hopefully we'll have something more about this work here fairly soon...

 

[Darach]

Here's a link to the study on patterns http://www.meresearch.org.uk/our-research/completed-studies/visual-stress/ which I found via an overview on visual problems @TomKindlon linked to http://www.meresearch.org.uk/news/shifting-focus/

I always hated small fiddly patterns, so I'm not surprised to find it connected to CFS/ME. However, my dislike of patterns goes back years before CFS/ME hit me (after a bad tummy bug I picked up abroad). What was going on? Is my dislike of patterns an older and unrelated problem, or have I had some level of CFS/ME much longer than I realised?

 

[irlen scotland]

PACE CBT/GET etc. Here we go again. I have a family of 5 with visual stress/IS 3 of which have Me/cfs Unfortunately thus research was sadly poor, the following masters worse. Even more interesting was the email conversation I had with Dr Hutchinson asking if she would take me on as supervisor to do a phd in the area of ME/cfs and its relationship to visual stress/IS which is urgently needing doing. The reply, NO we at Leicester do not know enough about visual stress. My response -not a problem I do, I am one of the top in the UK in this area, ..... Was ignored. Help, this is a huge problem for those with Me/cfs can any one suggest a university or potential supervisor on the UK? Not sure how much more I can say as I work in this area professionally?