This is a question I had recently looking into for a friend whose little boy had been diagnosed with it. A squint is a condition where one eye turns inwards, outwards, upwards or downwards while the other eye looks forwards. The misalignment of the eye is caused by an incorrect balance of the eye muscles. The medical name is strabismus. Squints are really quite common and affect about one in 20 children. They usually develop during the first three years of life, but can appear later. A squint is often spotted in early childhood, sometimes within weeks of a baby being born, as was the case with my friends son.

There are four different types of squint. They are classified according to the direction in which the eye turns and squints can also be:

•constant, apparent at all times, or
•intermittent, only apparent at certain times.

The cause, severity and direction of a squint vary from person to person.

The question bothering my friend has been how does a squint affect vision?
It is apparently very important that a squint is picked up and treated as early as possible to avoid vision problems developing. If a squint is identified when a child is young, there is a good chance it will be successfully treated.

In young children, a squint can mean binocular vision fails to develop resulting in a ‘lazy eye’. To avoid double vision, the child’s brain ignores the signals from the eye with the squint and only recognises images from the normal eye. As the squinting eye is not being used, it eventually becomes ‘lazy’.

In older children, a squint may cause double vision but not result in a lazy eye. This is because their vision has fully developed and their brain is unable to ignore signals from the eye with the squint. If the vision in a child’s squinting eye is poor, they may have to wear a patch over their other eye to encourage the vision in the squinting eye to develop.

We were wondering as well if adults could develop a squint? The answer is that occasionally, squints that have been corrected during childhood reappear in adulthood. Squints that affect adults may cause double vision as the brain has been trained to collect images from both eyes.

I hope this helps anyone else who has had a recent diagnosis of squint in their child.

Squint is common in children mostly, but it may develop in adults occasionally, it is due to weakening of the retro ocular muscle of the eyes which help to rotate the eye ball, and helps in vision, there are some squint patients which have this disease Congenitally and a surgery some times help to over come this.

Yes thats right. I used to work in an ophthalmologists and we used to see loads of kids with squints. There are some treatments that can help the situation but generally it does end up in a surgical correction being needed.

As I understood it, it is much better to get the operation done as the eyesight can then develop normally without the drawback of a squint. This is a well established area of ophthalmic surgery so there really is nothing for a parent to fear if their child needs this corrective surgery.