Prognosis of astigmatism in the baby
If astigmatism in a baby is not recognized until later, untreated it often leads to overstrain and resulting headaches, as the brain tries to compensate for the astigmatism and focus the image despite the distortion on the retina. If only one eye is affected, it happens that the healthy eye takes over the work of the visual process for both eyes and the diseased eye is “switched off” in the brain, so to speak, by suppressing the visual information arriving from the diseased eye. In the long term, this means a great deal of stress for the healthy eye and often leads to severe headaches in the long term as well.
Sometimes one eye is more affected by astigmatism than the other, and the baby may try to compensate for this unevenness by strabismus. Strabismus causes the eye muscles to be misaligned. If the astigmatism is not recognized in time, it can also lead to additional defective vision such as short- or long-sightedness.
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