Hello and welcome to the Zero to Finals podcast. My name is Tom and in this episode I'm going to be

talking to you about Squints. And if you want to follow along with written notes on this topic,

you can follow along at zero tofinals.com slash squint or in the neurology section of the

Zero to Finals Pediatrics book. So let's get straight into it.

Squint refers to malalignment of the eyes, and it's also known as strabismus.

When the eyes are not aligned, the images on the retinas do not match,

and the person will experience double vision.

When this occurs in childhood,

before the eyes have fully established their connections to the brain,

the brain will cope with this maladignment of the eyes

by reducing the signal from the less dominant eye.

This results in one eye that they use to see,

which is the dominant eye, and one eye that they

ignore, which we call the lazy eye. If this is not treated, the lazy eye becomes progressively

more disconnected from the brain and over time the problem becomes worse. This is referred to as

amblyopia.

Concommonant squints are due to differences in the control of the extraocular muscles.

The severity of the squint can vary.

Paralytic squints are rare and they're due to paralysis of one or more of the extra ocular muscles.

Let's go through some definitions.

Strabismus is where the eyes are malaligned.

Amblyopia is where the affected eye becomes passive and has reduced function compared to the dominant eye.

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