What Causes Crossed Eyes?

Proper eye development and alignment play important roles in your depth perception. They also prevent you from seeing double and having other eyesight errors. “Crossed eyes,” also known as strabismus, is a vision disorder that occurs when your eyes can’t look at the same point at the same time.

Insight Vision Center Optometry, your trusted provider of scleral lenses and other eye care services, talks about this eye problem in detail.

Causes and Risk Factors

Each eye is supported by six muscles that control your ocular movements. Problems with their coordination may lead to poor eye alignment, such as crossed eyes. Strabismus often develops among infants and children around three years old. That said, older kids and adults may also have this problem.

While it’s not clear what causes the faulty eye muscle control, heredity is a major risk factor for strabismus development. Those with severe farsightedness or hyperopia are also prone to developing this problem. Your vision therapy experts share that individuals with head injuries, cerebral palsy and Down syndrome are more likely of having this condition as well.

Types and Symptoms

Strabismus is classified based on the direction the eye turns. Esotropia refers to the inward turning of one of your eyes while exotropia pertains to the outward turning of the affected eye. An eye that looks upward is called hypertropia. On the other hand, hypotropia occurs when your weaker eye often points downward. The eye turning may happen all the time (constant) or only when you’re tired or doing close work. It may also affect one eye all the time (unilateral) or both right and left eyes in an alternating pattern.

Our Recommended Management

Upon confirming strabismus through a comprehensive eye exam, we may prescribe corrective eyeglasses or contact lenses to compensate for the refractive error contributing to the eye misalignment. We may also have you try prism lenses. They alter the light rays entering your eyes, eliminating or at least reducing the amount of turning your affected eye must do to view certain objects.

Vision therapy is another effective treatment. We’ll create a structured program of activities that can help improve the teamwork between your eyes, resulting in better focusing process. For more severe cases, surgery may be needed to change the position or length of the muscles controlling the affected eye.

To learn more about strabismus, call us at (714) 486-3315. You may also complete our form to request an appointment. We serve Costa Mesa, Newport Beach and nearby California areas.