‘Wandering eye’ may raise risk of falls for older adults | Fox News

Older people with strabismus, where one eye points slightly inward or outward affecting vision, are about 27 percent more likely than people without the condition to be injured by a fall, according to a new study.

The disorder, often called “wandering eye,” becomes more common with age and can cause double vision or depth perception problems because the two eyes are not pointing in the same direction.

Previous studies have shown that having other eye disorders like cataracts, glaucoma or age-related macular degeneration increases the risk of injuries, fractures or falls, the study team writes in JAMA Opthalmology. But this is the first to examine whether so-called binocular vision problems have the same effect.

“Strabismus in adults is becoming more prevalent as the aging population increases and we do not know the impact of strabismus on patient quality of life and morbidity,” lead author Dr. Stacy Pineles told Reuters Health in an email.

“We hypothesized that strabismus could cause double vision or diminished depth perception, and we wanted to see whether this was associated with injuries such as falls, fractures, and musculoskeletal injuries,” said Pineles, an ophthalmologist with the Jules Stein Eye Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles.

They found almost 100,000 diagnoses of binocular vision problems. The great majority were either strabismus or diplopia, meaning double vision, which often goes along with strabismus. On average the patients were older, white, were more often male and had other health problems like diabetes and heart disease.

About 75 percent of those with binocular vision problems had also reported some type of musculoskeletal injury, fall or fracture during that 10-year time span, compared to about 60 percent of patients without a binocular visual disorder.

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