ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Many postural, gait, and balance issues that follow trauma or occur with neurological conditions are rooted in visual processing syndromes. Now a new instrument called NeurOpTrek enables clinicians who aren’t necessarily experts in an emerging specialty called neuro-optometric rehabilitation to diagnose and treat certain visual processing disorders, and quantitatively assess risk-of-fall in patients with balance issues.
If Padula Rehabilitation Technologies (PRT) is the first start-up in the neuro-optometric rehabilitation space to grace these pages, it’s perhaps because the specialty is emerging and still somewhat rarefied. It’s the merging of optometric science and rehabilitation to address gait, postural, or balance issues that persist in patients who have suffered a stroke, traumatic brain injury, or other trauma, or who have Parkinson’s disease or other neurological conditions. These patients act like they have musculoskeletal issues, so that’s where most clinicians have typically focused their therapeutic strategies, by offering surgery, or physical or occupational therapy. But despite conventional treatment, a great number of patients fail to get better. For many, the root of the problem lies in a dysfunction around how vision is processed in the brain. The same is often true for the balance issues that come with aging, where falls in the elderly threaten to break the Medicare budget.
