Near Sightedness as a Possible Contributing Cause to AS

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I am myopic (near sighted). My vision has become progressively more near sighted with age, and this is strongly genetic. My brother and sister are both near sighted, and so are my parents. I have read that congenital blindness can lead to autism without proper mental stimulation to replace the lack of vision. (Well, obviously autistic symptoms beyond the ones they obviously would display from not being able to see.) The reason is that the parts of the brain that process social-emotional information just don't develop right without the evolutionarily determined environmental triggers.

Before, say, first grade, my social skills weren't top knotch; but they weren't terrible, either. I had high self-esteem. I made friends. Then my near-sightedness became worse, requiring me to wear glasses, which I hated. I never wore my glasses outside school; and, by about fourth grade, without my glasses, my ability to distinguish faces beyond a blur of flesh-toned color was gone. I imagine this is how my auditory-verbal (I hesitate to say sequential because sequencing was my second biggest weakness of the verbal subtests on the WAIS-III after the arithmetic one) skills developed leaps and bounds ahead of my visuospatial and visuomotor performance skills. Early in my life, I was classicaly right brained. I even had trouble knowing when words rhymed until, eventually, in a special reading class, I came to the realization that, on the worksheet, rhyming words had similar spellings at the end (a visual rather than phonemic assessment)! Yes, I suppose I had what would have been classified as dyslexia back then. Of course, my reading comprehension eventually shot through the roof once I mastered it. My spelling, punctuation, and capitalization (language mechanics) lagged behind for several more years, though, resulting in the 1994 diagnosis of neurologically determined (inferred from clumsiness) specific learning disability impacting on written language. I also colored and drew a ton as a young child; it was my passion.

In elementary school, I had changed from optimistic, happy, and carefree to painfully shy, anxious, and brooding. My self-esteem eventually crumbled. My social skills did not keep up with my classmates' despite my recognized intelligence and creativity.

I am not sure what to make of your observations, except that I experienced a similar pattern of visual and social regression. However, I generally attributed each to different causes and did not attempt to link them. I figured that I became more near-sighted because my perseverations often required reading words at close range on a piece of paper or a computer screen, and I figured that I became more anti-social because the cynicism that comes with age was finally allowing me to see my horrible social errors. When I was little, nothing used to bother me, not even when I accidentally said something that had a crazy hidden perverted meaning or insulted people by being honest in the wrong way. I think I get decent mental stimulation from staring at the things I can see clearly, such as the patterns on a marble-printed table in front of me, but is that an appropriate kind of stimulation?

Your theory makes sense, though I do not have enough background information on neurology and such to understand it fully. I interpreted similar results a bit differently, and it now appears that the subject could use some research.


[Faces are a blur to me beyond a certain distance, but at close range, I can still have difficulty committing a person's face to memory because of my reluctance to look at it. Looking at a face would put me at a risk of eye contact.]

Last edited by Glasskitten on 17 Jan 2006, 10:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

There might be some sort of correlation, but I don't think it's very strong. I wear glasses all the time, but my eyesight isn't that bad, and I think I'm actually more farsighted, if anything.

That idea really sounds absurd. Blind people don't just develop into autistics, because they are blind. Being unable to distinguish faces without glasses, doesn't make you AS, its just a normal sideeffect of not wearing your glasses. I find, that learning to distinguish objects/faces without glasses, when I finally do wear glasses, its very easy to distinguish between faces. It improves visual processing.

Secondly, everyone comes to the realization that rhyming words have similar spellings at the end. If you couldn't tell that they rhymed first, you wouldn't have realized that rhyming words have similar spellings.

You don't just change from being an NT into being AS, over the course of years. It defies what AS actually is. If you did, then you don't have AS. You'd just be a shy guy, with problems that give you similar symptoms as AS.

I have read about this in scientific literature, but I do not have a source handy. Although face reading isn't all there is to social reading, more concrete face reading leads people to abstract that emotional understanding to nonfacial contexts. Or so goes the theory. Anyway, it has been shown that blind people are at higher risk of developing autism.

Remember autism has more than one cause. Some people inherit genes that pretty much push their brains to develop autistically. Other people are deprived the environmental stimuli necessary for typical development. In cases of extreme neglect and sensory deprivation, abused children will develop autistically: a condition known as pseudoautistic syndrome.

I didn't. For the life of me, I could not "hear" how two words rhymed with each other. However, I had to do worksheets for a reading program that required us to choose the word that rhymed. I just guessed until I noticed a pattern among the correct answers: that the correct answers ended with the same letters as the original word.

Another thing is what would you make of people who have been traumatically injured in the brain and develop autistic-like symptoms? Are they not autistic simply because their autism is not developmental? Remember that many of the specific developmental disorders are called developmental for a reason: In many cases, a similar deficit occurs with brain damage. For example, there is developmental receptive language disorder; a brain injury to a certain part of the left cortical hemisphere causes the same problems in adults.

The worse my eyesight has got (near-sightedness, lack of peripheral vision) the less i have found social interaction easy so i think it can compound you're symptoms rather than cause it but i think that is what NeantHumain was saying.

I wear glasses and my social abilities are the same with, or without them. It is also remotely possible that nearsightedness is a side effect of the autism, since autism is considered neurological, at least by all of the professionals I have seen (with the exception of my GP which seems to think it is an anxiety disorder). Would this indicate that everyone with autism has bad eyesight, or that everyone with bad eyesight is autistic? Certainly not, so the theory just doesn't seem sound. The same can be said about Tourette's. I read one thing that said Tourette's and AS are inserperable. BS, I tell ya! Not everyone with autism has Tourette's and not everyone with Tourette's is autistic. With my glasses on I am no better at facial recognition than without them, though without them faces are harder to see from a distance. Either way I have some really weird difficulties with recognizing people. Have you ever walked up to a total stranger at the store and said "hi mom", or watched a movie and annoyed other people in the room by blurting out that 4 people in the film (that everyone says look totally different) all look like someone that you have met IRL? If I were blind then reading faces and body language wouldn't even be an issue, so I am sure that blind people can show some autistic traits in certain situations because of this, just as people with a hearing loss tend to watch mouths instead of eyes as well.

What if you were born, not blind, not sighted, not near sighted, but partially sighted? Meaning that you always need the aid of artificial lenses to focus any light. As a baby you can’t to see and consequently learn social-communications skills; your brain then develops without most of these skills.

You therefore get similar difficulties/differences associated to that of the autistic spectrum: more specifically that of Asperger’s. But technically you don’t have ASD because the autistic spectrum is a difference in the processing of sensory information; where eye problems are the entering of corrupt visual-sensory information into the brain.

For those people who just need glasses for certain situations [perhaps age related] and were not born blind or partial sighted then I can’t really see how the eye problems can result in you having autistic spectrum or anything much similar [non-autistic].

Which would tend to bring us back to the Bruno Bettelheim rationale for Autism, based on the 'Refrigerator Mother' Theory.

I suspect that even the most rabid of psychodynamic therapists would concede the existence of some forms of autism that are not correlated to the child's treatment by its parents (though maltreatment can produce co-morbid emotional and psychological complications), and as regards the less severe forms of autism, many psychodynamic therapists are wont to discount it as nothing more than emotional disturbance founded on poor early-years relationships anyway.

My grandson (dx'd PDD/NOS) has started kindergarten this year. He has been tested on various skills and the testing revealed that he can read at the level of a third grader. He started talking when he was 3 1/2 years old. Just a month ago I noticed that he does read well and also has a very good comprehension of words and can group words that are similiar, but does not understand rhyming words. I tried to show him how rhyming words have similar spellings but to no avail. (I didn't push it.) For some reason, he thinks that rhyming words must have something in common (other than letters) - maybe this will be one of those things that "clicks" as he gets older....he is only 5.

I wouldn't say there's much connection. I started wearing glasses in the last seven months cause I have a lazy eye, I'm only mildly long sighted at most.

Nearsighted, but not until age 15 (AS dx not 'til age 31). Don't consider these to be related in origin, but they do interact in my life. Avoid wearing glasses (for MANY reasons) which means I can't see well beyond a few feet away. Can't identify familiar persons if I see them or they see me, out in public. Even if I did wear my glasses (or had contact lenses) I get so scared being out in public that I don't often look up & around. Upshot is that not being able to see well makes it harder to get detailed information from my environment-which has both plusses & minuses.

I am near sighted. I wore glasses for a while when I was younger, but now I wear contacts. I don't think that sight has anything to do with AS, though.

NeantHumain wrote: 'I have read that congenital blindness can lead to autism without proper mental stimulation to replace the lack of vision. (Well, obviously autistic symptoms beyond the ones they obviously would display from not being able to see.)"

I taught in a school for the blind in 1976 after teaching in mainstream schools. I was fascinated by the unususal social-emotional responses of otherwise "developmentally normal" children blind from birth. They were clearly different from the NT sighted children with whom I had been working for four years. I made a bit of a fuss about it and someone gave me a paper taken [I think] from Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. It was written by Selma Fraiberg and [???] Freedman. In the paper they postulated a rate of autism in totally blind children of 20%. As a graduate student this was my major area of research and, over subsequent years I have worked with a number of totally blind children and adults, some of whom probably became autistic adventitiously. Certainly the treatment/management models for these clients are identical to those I develop for sighted autistics, allowing for the visual impairment.

What happens in these totally blind infants/children is that, in the absence of sight, which is the dominant sense and which grants a pseudo object permanence and sensory integration before the concept of object permanence and actual sensory integration has developed in normal children, the blind child has no reason to develop reach/move outward to pick up a toy, etc. and cannot "reach" with his sight as it does not exist. However the human brain is a sponge demanding high levels of sensory input all the time. 85% of sensory input comes from sight. In the absence of sufficient sensory input from sources within and without the body, blind children "turn inwards" so-to-speak and seek stimulation from their own bodies. [So-called "blindisms".] One researcher wrote that totally blind children are "faced with the everpresent self-seduction of their own bodies." This is why totally blind infants are now given a treatment developed by the Danish researcher Lilli Nielsen called the "Little Room". They are placed in a very small three dimensional space that is small enough that they, in their random actions, can touch the boundaries of the space. As well objects are hung from the ceiling so the infants can touch them, at first randomly, but later by deliberate action which then indicates that some sense or awareness of objects "not-self" outside the body ["self"] exist and continue to exist. Lillie Nielsen has writen extensively on the issue in Self in blind children and this issue of Self also has ramifications for ASD people. You can find more on autism in the blind in an article by paediatrician Hilary Cass: “Visual Impairment and Autism -What we know about causation and early identification” on the web site for the Scottish Sensory Centre. Autism in blind children is often diagnosed much later than in sighted children. One of my clients was, by all clinical reports, apparently just a mildly intellectually impaired totally blind girl until about 7 years, but, by the time she was referred to me for severe behaviour at age 9 she was clearly autistic.

Jim Crawford.

NB. Iam terribly short-sighted, but I doubt that has anything to do with my autism.