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How to manage children with nystagmus

Published on July 30, 2026   27 min

A selection of talks on Ophthalmology

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0:00
Hello. I'm Jay Self. I'm a pediatric ophthalmologist and an associate professor in Southampton in the UK, and I run a lot of clinical services and do lots of research into nystagmus, particularly children with nystagmus. I'm going to talk today about how to manage children with nystagmus.
0:21
Now we have a problem, and the problem is that pediatric nystagmus has a lot of nuances to it and a lot of details which make it really difficult for clinicians.
0:38
One of these problems is that wiggly eyes in and of themselves are quite tricky. You can see from these videos that often children move. Often, they have other associated movements of head or body, and the eye movements themselves can be really quite tricky to pin down. Are they vertical? Are they rotating? Are they horizontal, etc? The wiggly eyes themselves are quite difficult.
1:06
Also, when we look at classification of eye movements, there's a huge amount of complexity and lots of overlap in the ways that people classify eye movement problems from fixation issues to saccadic insufficiency, through to square-wave jerks, through to idiopathic nystagmus, congenital motor nystagmus; there's a whole load of terminology which can be really quite unhelpful for clinicians. So it's a very complex thing in terms of terminology that's used.
1:36
The final part of the puzzle and the difficulty is that children are children. They can be fantastic and allow you to do every test that you want to do, but quite often they're not; quite often, they're really not. So getting all the information at a single appointment can be very difficult.

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