Rehabilitation of homonymous hemianopsia

Abstract

Homonymous hemianopia, most often caused by cerebral arterial infarction, represents for the patient a severe handicap, whereby beside bumping into persons and objects disturbance of reading and writing are predominant. In the beginning the patients often are not aware of the hemianopia (anosognosia) or even completely deny it (hemi-neglect). For rehabilitation of homonymous hemianopia different successful methods are at disposal. 1. Improvement of the patient's attention for the blind hemifield, 2. Enlargement of the saccadic search field. 3. Systematization of the search strategies, 4. Treatment of the hemianopic reading and writing disturbance, 5. Auxiliary optical measures. The rehabilitation of homonymous hemianopia with the described different methods is most successful and improves for the patient not only elementary and higher visual functions (visual exploration, reading and writing ability, parafoveal visual field, recognition of forms and colours), but may under favorable circumstances even restore partial or total working capacity.