Visual stress

The POLA clinic

What is the purpose of this clinic?

Visual stress is also known as pattern glare, scotopic sensitivity, Irlen’s Syndrome and Meares-Irlen Syndrome. Visual stress causes you to be very sensitive to high contrast striped patterns, such as black and white stripes, lines of text on a page, striped carpets, escalators and fences.

A visual stress assessment will check your sensitivity to patterns, reading speed and if coloured overlays/lenses will help you. Our team includes optometrists who have significant experience in managing visual stress in children and adults.

Who can be seen?

Visual stress assessments are provided in the POLA clinic.

Children with suspected visual stress can directly book into the POLA clinic, where they will undergo an eye examination and visual stress assessment.

Adults with suspect visual stress will firstly be required to undergo an eye examination in our Primary Care clinic. You will then be referred to the POLA clinic for a visual stress assessment, should this be appropriate, or if you specifically request it.

Book an appointment

Appointments can be made by contacting the main optometry clinic reception.

Phone: 0161 306 3860
Email: optometry.clinics@manchester.ac.uk

Costs

Visual stress assessments will cost £120 (covers all appointments across one academic year).

What happens at appointments?

For a visual stress and colorimetry assessment, student optometrists, under the supervision of a qualified optometrist, will take a step-by-step approach for your assessment.

The symptoms of visual stress (such as blurring vision when reading, words and letters ‘jumping’ around when reading, difficulty concentrating when reading) can overlap with the symptoms of problems with eye coordination and eye focusing. This means that we will first conduct tests to check your depth perception, eye coordination and eye focusing.

If you are found to have an eye coordination or eye focusing problem, we will treat this first. To do this, we can use spectacles or eye exercises. If you have visual stress symptoms, but your eye coordination and eye focusing is fine, we will carry out tests to check your sensitivity to patterns and reading ability, and how coloured overlays/lenses affect these.

We are able to dispense precision tinted lenses where required.

What to bring

Please bring along any current spectacles (if relevant). It is also helpful to bring your most recent spectacle prescription, but do not worry if this isn’t available.

Please bring information about any current medications you are taking.

Service lead

Dr Ketan Parmar.

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