The ophthalmologist's role in multidisciplinary assessment of developmentally handicapped children

Among 200 children who had received routine ophthalmic and orthoptic examinations as part of their evaluation by a multidisciplinary assessment team, it was found that there was a high incidence of ocular defects. These defects included refractive errors (98 children), squint (74 children), nystagmus (15 children), cataract, retinopathy and optic atrophy. This high incidence of ocular defects emphasized the need for the routine ophthalmic examination of developmentally handicapped children in order to detect and treat ocular conditions which might otherwise have gone undetected, and enabled the visual sense of these children to be evaluated in relationship to their general development.