Neuro-Optometry vs. Traditional Optometry: Key Differences Explained

For the more than 150 million Americans who have less than ideal vision (think 20/20), there are thousands of optometrists who can answer the call and help them see better.

For people whose vision is affected by something neurological in nature, such as a traumatic brain injury or stroke, we have neuro-optometry.

To help explain the difference between these two vision specialities, we turn to the experienced team of neuro-optometrists at DeyeNAMICS. In this post, we dive into some key differences between optometry and neuro-optometry so you know where to turn when your visual system isn’t working as it should.

Taking a Closer Look at Vision

To understand the key differences between optometry and neuro-optometry, it helps to understand what happens when you “see.”

When your eyes focus on something, information is sent through the optic nerve, which connects your eyes to your brain. More specifically, your optic nerve sends the information to certain areas dedicated to vision in your brain including the occipital lobe, which represents a relatively large portion of your brain located near the back of your skull. .

While the occipital lobe in your brain is dedicated to vision, other lobes are involved in visual processing.

For example, the parietal lobe in your brain helps you process the space around you and helps with depth perception, letting you know where your bed is in relation to the doorway of your bedroom. Your temporal lobe gets in on the action by creating memories around what you see and recognizing objects, like your favorite book. Your frontal lobe helps you direct your attention and move your eyes to specific objects of interest, like from your phone to your pet walking into the room. 

How Optometry Helps You See Better

The term optometry comes from the Greek words optos, which indicates vision, and metron, which indicates measuring. So, optometry measures your vision, quite simply.

This frontline specialty helps the millions of people who have refractive errors to see better — refractive errors occur in the eyes, not in the brain’s visual processing system. This specialty also helps maintain the overall health of the eyes themselves to ensure they are capable of providing necessary visual information for the brain to interpret. This is incredibly important and necessary to maintaining healthy eyes for vision, but is not the only reason why there can be a dysfunction in vision.

Neuro-Optometry and Your Vision

As we learned, eyes are the instruments of vision, but visual processing really takes place in your brain. Just as your hands can feel something, it’s your brain that processes that sensory information and interprets the sensation and gives it meaning.

Because most of your brain is involved in your visual system, damage to any of these areas can affect your vision, which is where neuro-optometry comes in. Our team addresses the issues in the brain that can affect your:

• Vision
• Depth perception
• Balance
• Spatial processing

While we mentioned traumatic brain injuries and strokes as issues that can lead to damage to the visual system, neuro-optometry helps with vision issues in people with:

• Multiple sclerosis
• Parkinson’s disease
• Cerebral palsy
• Autism
• Attention-deficit disorder
• Infections, such as Lyme disease

Our work with these conditions helps people better navigate their worlds when an issue in the central nervous system affects how they process visual information.

If you’d like to learn more about neuro-optometry or feel that you or a loved one might benefit from this vision specialty, contact us at one of our offices in Sacramento, Bellflower, or Valencia, California; Guildford, Connecticut; Cedar Rapids, Iowa; or Plano, Texas, to set up an appointment.