J Korean Ophthalmol Soc.
2006 Feb;47(2):283-291.
The Effectiveness of Visual Evoked Potentials in Disability Evaluation
- Affiliations
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- 1Department of Ophthalmology, Soonchunhyang University, College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea. parksonghee55@hanmail.net
Abstract
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PURPOSE: This study aimed to find out whether the pattern and flash visual evoked potentials (VEP) is useful as methods to examine functional visual loss (FVL) among patients complaining of decreased visual acuity after trauma.
METHODS
The medical records of trauma-related patients entrusted to the department of ophthalmology for evaluation from January 2001 to October 2004 were reviewed, Correlation were then analyzed by comparing visual acuity, visual field, and visual evoked potentials.
RESULTS
There were 45 subjects, 23 of whom complained of symptoms including decreased visual acuity or visual field constriction in one eye. However no abnormalities were found in ophthalmologic tests, and pattern of flash visual evoked potentials were found to be normal for their eyes. Therefore, the cases were diagnosed with functional visual loss. Among the 23 cases, 4 showed abnormal results in the pattern visual evoked potentials, but findings for the eyes in terms of flash visual evoked potentials were normal, so these were also diagnosed with functional visual loss.
CONCLUSIONS
With visual evoked potentials only, one cannot diagnosed functional visual loss, but, it could be employed usefully as complementary test in the examination of patients for whom functional visual loss is doubted clinically.
