What causes strabismus in children?

Parents should pay more attention to their children's eye health, because if certain abnormal conditions are not dealt with in a timely manner, it can easily cause irreparable permanent damage. There are many reasons why children may have strabismus, such as congenital abnormalities, imperfect development, abnormal eye development, etc. These are the causes that parents need to know more about.

Congenital anomalies:

This type of strabismus is mostly caused by congenital abnormal development of the position 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. There are also cases where the use of forceps during delivery causes head and facial injuries to the baby, or the mother uses excessive force during delivery, which increases the intracranial pressure of the fetus and causes punctate hemorrhages in the brain. The bleeding happens to be in the nerve nucleus that controls eye movement, causing paralysis of the extraocular muscles. In addition, there are also genetic factors. Strabismus is not inherited by all members of the family. 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.

Developmental impairment:

Children, especially infants and young children, have incomplete binocular vision function and cannot coordinate the extraocular muscles well. Any unstable factors can lead to the occurrence of strabismus. Human's monocular vision function is gradually developed after birth. Just like the visual function, this function is established by repeatedly receiving stimulation from clear external images, and gradually develops and matures. Infants only have gross fusion image 2 months after birth, and the establishment of precise fusion image function will continue until after 5 years old. Stereoscopic vision is established at the latest, and it is close to that of adults at 6 to 7 years old. Therefore, the period before the age of 5 when binocular single vision function is not yet perfect is a high incidence period of strabismus in children.

Characteristics of eye development make children susceptible to strabismus:

Because children have small eyeballs and short eye axes, most of them are farsighted. Also, because children's cornea and lens 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.