Visual Discomfort and Reading

Completed

Conditions studied: Visual Fatigue

In brief

Reading can be an uncomfortable and difficult task for some people. Symptoms include unpleasant somatic and perceptual effects, such as eye-strain, headache, and blurred text, despite normal visual acuity. This condition has been called Visual Discomfort, but little is known about the symptoms and frequency of reading problems associated with this disorder. Several studies have proposed that Visual Discomfort is caused by increased noise in the visual system due to spreading cortical activation across different spatial frequency channels. This study examines the prevalence and severity of visual discomfort in a college student population and tests the noisy visual system hypothesis.

Key facts

Study ID

NCT00402155

Run by

Southern California College of Optometry at Marshall B. Ketchum University

People needed

100

Starts

2004-07-01

Expected to finish

2008-12-01

Last updated by the study team

2009-11-13

Who can join

Age: 17 and older, up to 30. Sex: any. Healthy volunteers: accepted.

You may qualify if…

• normal College age subjects with low visual discomfort scores on the Conlon visual discomfort survey.
• normal College age subjects with high visual discomfort scores on the Conlon visual discomfort survey.

You may not qualify if…

• English as a second language, uncorrected visual defects, reading disabilities, medical conditions that might cause uncomfortable visual symptoms, strabismus, stereopsis less than 70 seconds of arc, any ocular pathology, color vision deficiency, IQ less than 90.

Where it is running

• Claremont McKenna College — Claremont, California, United States

Full record on ClinicalTrials.gov

Trial information comes from ClinicalTrials.gov and is refreshed daily. TrialsForMe does not provide medical care and does not run the studies it lists.