What causes strabismus in children?

Under normal circumstances, our eyes are looking straight ahead, but there are some special cases. For example, some children never look straight at things, but sideways. Therefore, when encountering such a situation, many parents say that their children are suffering from eye disease. However, strabismus sometimes has nothing to do with any disease. Here I will analyze for you how strabismus is caused in children.

Imperfect development - such as weaning, teeth replacement, fright, vibration, etc., can destroy the brain's fusion function and cause strabismus. Some children fell seriously ill and after having a high fever for several days, their eyes became slanted. Some children fall off the bed and their eyes become slanted.

Congenital abnormalities - This type of strabismus is mostly caused by congenital abnormalities in the position and development of the extraocular muscles, abnormal development of the extraocular muscles themselves, incomplete differentiation of the mesoderm, poor separation of the eye muscles, abnormal muscle sheaths and fibrosis, and other anatomical defects or paralysis of the nerves that control the muscles. Some cases are due to the use of forceps during delivery, which causes damage to the baby's head and face, or the mother's excessive force during delivery, which causes increased intracranial pressure on the fetus and produces punctate hemorrhages in the brain. The bleeding happens to be in the nerve nucleus that controls eye movement, causing paralysis of the extraocular muscles.

Genetic factors - strabismus is not inherited in all family members. This defect is often indirectly passed on to the next generation of children. Generally, strabismus that occurs within 6 months after birth is called congenital strabismus. It does not have the basic conditions for establishing binocular vision and has the greatest harm to the development of visual function.

The characteristics of eye development make children susceptible to strabismus - because children's eyeballs are small and their eye axes are short, most of them are farsighted. Also, because children's corneas and lenses have strong refractive power and ciliary muscle contraction force, they have strong accommodation power. Such children need more accommodation power to see objects clearly. At the same time, their eyes turn inward forcefully, resulting in excessive convergence, which can easily cause esotropia, a type of esotropia called accommodative esotropia.

Insufficient control ability of the eye movement center - if convergence is too strong or abduction is insufficient, or both exist at the same time, esotropia will occur; conversely, if abduction is too strong, convergence is insufficient, or both exist at the same time, exotropia will occur.

Precautions

There are also some patients with paralytic strabismus who see double objects due to paralysis of the eye muscles. To overcome the double vision, they adopt special head positions such as tilting the head, turning the face to the side, and lifting the chin to compensate, which is medically called "compensatory head position." For children, this not only affects their appearance, but also causes skeletal deformities throughout the body. It can be seen that the harm of strabismus not only affects beauty, but in order to reduce and avoid the above-mentioned serious complications, it must be taken seriously and treated early.