Search PubMed⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search PubMed

Results for “Persons with Visual Disabilities”

Search indexed PubMed citations on genomics, clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health. Explore titles, authors and supplied subject terms, then open the PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 847 records · Page 47Linked to original sources
PubMed2004

Use of assistive devices in daily activities among 85-year-olds living at home focusing especially on the visually impaired.

PURPOSE: The purpose was to investigate the use of assistive devices in daily activities and its relation to daily activities. METHOD: 85-year-old persons (n = 617) were studied in a descriptive, cross-sectional population study. RESULTS: The overall use of assistive devices was 77% in the total population of 85-year-old persons and the results show that persons who have visual impairment use more assistive devices. The most common category of assistive devices in the population was connected with bathing followed by mobility devices. The majority of the assistive device users in all groups were independent in both instrumental (I-ADL) and personal daily activities (P-ADL). There was a statistically significant higher proportion of device users who were independent in daily activities in the normal vision group compared to the visual impairment groups. There was already a significant difference in the use of assistive devices at a visual acuity level of 0.7-0.5 compared to participants with normal vision. CONCLUSION: The results show that it is imperative to provide intervention such as assistive devices in P and I-ADL earlier in the disablement process in order to slow down the progression of decline, as persons with visual impairment are at high risk of developing disability.

Activities of Daily Living↗
PubMed1999

Using an orientation system for indoor travel and activity with persons with multiple disabilities.

PURPOSE: The study assessed the effectiveness of an orientation system, consisting of a programmable control device linked to acoustic and light sources, for facilitating independent indoor travel and activity in two persons with profound intellectual disability and blindness or severe visual impairment. METHOD: The control device was programmed to activate each destination the persons were to reach and the acoustic or light sources leading to it automatically (i.e. after a preset time from the persons reaching the previous destination). One person was exposed to two baseline phases without the system being alternated with two orientation phases with the system; the other person received only one baseline and one orientation phase. RESULTS: Data showed that during the orientation phases, both persons benefited from the use of the system and could reach the destinations successfully and carry out the activities. CONCLUSIONS: The possibility of promoting independent indoor travel and activity in persons with multiple disabilities may have important implications for the condition of these persons and for rehabilitation and care centres.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed1980

Visual and auditory selective attention and reflection-impulsivity in normal and learning-disabled boys at two age levels.

Selective attention to visual and auditory stimuli and reflection-impulsivity were studied in normal and learning-disabled 8- and 12-year-old boys. Multivariate analyses, followed by univariate and paired-comparison tests, indicated that the normal children increased in selective attention efficiency with age to both visual and auditory stimuli. Learning-disabled children increased in selective attention efficiency with age to auditory, but not to visual, stimuli. Both groups increased with age in reflection as measured by Kagan's Matching Familiar Figures Test (MFF). The 8-year-old learning-disabled children were more impulsive than the 8-year-old normals on MFF error scores, but not on MFF latency scores. No difference occurred between the 12-year-old learning-disabled and normal children on either MFF error or MFF latency scores. Correlations between the selective attention scores and MFF error and latency scores were not significant.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1999

Visual perception in 'low vision'.

'Low vision' has an international classification as an impairment of vision that is defined by loss of visual acuity and the size of the visual field. Functional classification that would depict capability to use vision in different activities has not yet been agreed upon. Abnormal visual information leads to changes in visual perception, and brain-damage-related visual impairment may alter or prevent one or several cognitive visual functions. Abnormal visual perception opens a window into brain mechanisms that the psychophysicists otherwise do not have. Together with clinicians, psychophysicists can help visually impaired persons to understand the nature of their disability by thoroughly studying the nature of the altered image and the profile of cognitive visual functions.

Humans↗
PubMed2001

Neuroticism predicts depression and disability in age-related macular degeneration.

OBJECTIVES: Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a common, disabling disorder of older age that is associated with depression. We investigated the incidence rate of depression and its risk factors and consequences in this 6-month longitudinal study. DESIGN: A prospective cohort study in which subjects were interviewed 6 weeks after the onset of bilateral vision loss and 6 months later. SETTING: The sample was recruited from the retinovascular clinic of a specialty eye hospital. PARTICIPANTS: Subjects were 51 patients with new onset bilateral AMD. MEASUREMENTS: We assessed depressive symptoms, personality traits, visual acuity, and vision and physical functioning. Additionally, we interviewed informants to obtain independent assessments of subjects' personality traits. RESULTS: The baseline prevalence rate of syndromal depression was 23.5% and high levels of depressive symptoms persisted over time. The 6-month incidence rate of depression was 27.8%. The strongest risk factors for incident depression were self-rated and informant-rated neuroticism. Patients who developed syndromal depression were 8.3 times (95% confidence interval = 1.1-63.4) more likely than nondepressed patients to become disabled in vision function, independent of change in visual acuity. CONCLUSION: AMD is associated with high rates of depression and visual disability independent of severity of vision loss. The personality trait of neuroticism is highly predictive of incident depression and identifies patients at high risk for excess disability. Psychotherapeutic treatments targeted to this group may prevent depression and reduce disability.

Activities of Daily Living↗
PubMed2003

Response to visual stimuli by adults with developmental disabilities.

Young college students with (n=20) and without (n=20) developmental disabilities performed a hand-eye coordination task that involved contacting illuminated target buttons on a wall-mounted board while simultaneously reading numbers in central vision. The target buttons were arranged in 5 concentric rings allowing for the computation of successful contact rates between different areas of the movement environment. Analysis showed, although students with developmental disabilities had lower overall contact rates than peers without such disabilities, both groups performed with comparable accuracy in all locations within the movement environment. This finding suggests that special adaptations of visual information in the working environment for a person with developmental disabilities may not be necessary.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Neural systems for sign language production: mechanisms supporting lexical selection, phonological encoding, and articulation.

Overt production of ASL signs was evaluated using H(2)(15)O PET to differentiate brain systems that support sign language production at the lexical-selection and phonological-articulatory levels. Subjects were 16 right-handed, congenitally deaf native ASL signers (10 women, six men; age 20 to 29 years). Scans were performed while subjects (1) passively viewed ASL nouns, (2) repeated nouns, (3) generated verbs in response to these nouns, (4) passively viewed videotaped segments depicting transitive actions, and (5) generated a verb to describe these actions. Conjunctions between the two verb-generation tasks revealed left-lateralized activation of perisylvian, frontal, and subcortical regions commonly observed in spoken language generation tasks and implicated in processes of semantic feature binding and lexical selection. Analysis of noun repetition minus viewing condition revealed activation of distinct systems supporting phonological encoding and articulation, including bilateral activation of sensorimotor areas and association cortices in the temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes. In addition, lexical-selection and articulatory processes were associated with activation of different corticostriatal-thalamocortical circuits: articulation with activation of the motor, and lexical-selection with activation of the prefrontal circuits, respectively. The results collectively provide insight into dissociable neural systems underlying these psycholinguistic functions. In addition, activation of regions that are typically associated with the auditory system during sign production suggests that these regions may support modality-independent linguistic processes, or may indicate cross-modal plasticity within the deaf brain.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Neural systems underlying lexical retrieval for sign language.

Positron emission tomography was used to investigate whether signed languages exhibit the same neural organization for lexical retrieval within classical and non-classical language areas as has been described for spoken English. Ten deaf native American sign language (ASL) signers were shown pictures of unique entities (famous persons) and non-unique entities (animals) and were asked to name each stimulus with an overt signed response. Proper name signed responses to famous people were fingerspelled, and common noun responses to animals were both fingerspelled and signed with native ASL signs. In general, retrieving ASL signs activated neural sites similar to those activated by hearing subjects retrieving English words. Naming famous persons activated the left temporal pole (TP), whereas naming animals (whether fingerspelled or signed) activated left inferotemporal (IT) cortex. The retrieval of fingerspelled and native signs generally engaged the same cortical regions, but fingerspelled signs in addition activated a premotor region, perhaps due to the increased motor planning and sequencing demanded by fingerspelling. Native signs activated portions of the left supramarginal gyrus (SMG), an area previously implicated in the retrieval of phonological features of ASL signs. Overall, the findings indicate that similar neuroanatomical areas are involved in lexical retrieval for both signs and words.

Adult↗
PubMed1998

Cerebral organization for language in deaf and hearing subjects: biological constraints and effects of experience.

Cerebral organization during sentence processing in English and in American Sign Language (ASL) was characterized by employing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at 4 T. Effects of deafness, age of language acquisition, and bilingualism were assessed by comparing results from (i) normally hearing, monolingual, native speakers of English, (ii) congenitally, genetically deaf, native signers of ASL who learned English late and through the visual modality, and (iii) normally hearing bilinguals who were native signers of ASL and speakers of English. All groups, hearing and deaf, processing their native language, English or ASL, displayed strong and repeated activation within classical language areas of the left hemisphere. Deaf subjects reading English did not display activation in these regions. These results suggest that the early acquisition of a natural language is important in the expression of the strong bias for these areas to mediate language, independently of the form of the language. In addition, native signers, hearing and deaf, displayed extensive activation of homologous areas within the right hemisphere, indicating that the specific processing requirements of the language also in part determine the organization of the language systems of the brain.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Neural correlates of British sign language comprehension: spatial processing demands of topographic language.

In all signed languages used by deaf people, signs are executed in "sign space" in front of the body. Some signed sentences use this space to map detailed "real-world" spatial relationships directly. Such sentences can be considered to exploit sign space "topographically." Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we explored the extent to which increasing the topographic processing demands of signed sentences was reflected in the differential recruitment of brain regions in deaf and hearing native signers of the British Sign Language. When BSL signers performed a sentence anomaly judgement task, the occipito-temporal junction was activated bilaterally to a greater extent for topographic than nontopographic processing. The differential role of movement in the processing of the two sentence types may account for this finding. In addition, enhanced activation was observed in the left inferior and superior parietal lobules during processing of topographic BSL sentences. We argue that the left parietal lobe is specifically involved in processing the precise configuration and location of hands in space to represent objects, agents, and actions. Importantly, no differences in these regions were observed when hearing people heard and saw English translations of these sentences. Despite the high degree of similarity in the neural systems underlying signed and spoken languages, exploring the linguistic features which are unique to each of these broadens our understanding of the systems involved in language comprehension.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2004

Visual-visual nonidentity matching assessment: a worthwhile addition to the assessment of basic learning abilities test.

The Assessment of Basic Learning Abilities test (ABLA) is a useful tool for choosing appropriate training tasks for persons with developmental disabilities. This test assesses the ease or difficulty with which persons are able to learn six hierarchically positioned discrimination tasks. A visual-visual nonidentity matching prototype task was examined to assess its (a). relation to the ABLA hierarchy, (b). predictive validity, and (c). test-retest reliability. Results from 23 participants with developmental disabilities suggest that visual-visual nonidentity matching is a worthwhile addition to the ABLA test and is positioned in the ABLA hierarchy above Level 4 (visual-visual identity matching) and below Level 6 (auditory-visual discrimination). The prototype visual-visual nonidentity matching task also demonstrated high predictive validity and test-retest reliability.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Prevalence of visual impairment in adults with intellectual disabilities in the Netherlands: cross-sectional study.

PURPOSE: To obtain the first representative and valid population-based prevalence figures on visual impairment and blindness in adults with intellectual disabilities (ID) and to identify risk groups. METHODS STUDY DESIGN: Cross-sectional survey. An age-Down's syndrome-stratified random sample of 1,598 persons from a base population of 9,012 adult users of ID services with mild to profound intellectual disabilities was screened. Participants underwent protocollised on-site screening of visual functions. Results were related to degree of ID, occurrence of Down's syndrome (DS) and age. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: Prevalences of visual impairment and blindness in the study population and in subgroups and weighted prevalences in the total Dutch population using ID services. RESULTS: Prevalences of visual impairment ranged from 2.2% (95% confidence interval (CI), 0.5-6.4) in young adults with mild ID and no Down's syndrome to 66.7% (95% CI, 41.0-86.7) in older adults with profound ID and Down's syndrome; prevalences of blindness ranged from 0.7% (95% CI, 0.1-4.1) to 38.9% (95% CI, 28.1-50.3). Weighted prevalences of visual impairment and blindness in the total Dutch population of adult users of intellectual disability services are 13.8% (95% CI, 9.3-18.4) and 5.0% (95% CI, 3.8-6.2), respectively. Prior to this study, visual impairment or blindness had remained undiagnosed in 106/261 (40.6%) persons. CONCLUSIONS: As compared to published figures for the general Dutch population aged 55 years and over (visual impairment 1.4%, blindness 0.5%), prevalences of visual impairment and blindness are higher in all subgroups with intellectual disabilities, including the young and mildly handicapped group. The diagnosis is too often missed. All persons with severe or profound intellectual disabilities, and all older adults with Down's syndrome, should be considered visually impaired until proved otherwise.

Adult↗