VISIBLE: Vision Intervention for Seeing Impaired Babies: Learning through Enrichment
VISIBLE is a novel early intervention RCT to address a gap in rehabilitative interventions for infants with brain damage and vision impairment.
Infants with cerebral visual impairment (CVI) at high risk of Cerebral Palsy (CP) at 3-6 months will be enrolled into a 6-month early intervention program. This pilot RCT study will assess the feasibility of a vision-awareness program actively engaging parents in enriching their baby’s vision and development compared to usual care. The home-based program of goal directed early intervention will be supported by a multidisciplinary team through parent training and fortnightly home visits. The daily intervention activities will be provided by the parents and will focus on environmental enrichment and targeted vision-aware developmental goals. Behavioural assessments will be utilized to evaluate the program's efficacy on vision, motor, and general developmental function. The five recruiting sites (Pisa, Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia) will utilize existing early detection and intervention networks to recruit at risk infants and their families to the study.
The study has been approved by the Children’s Health Queensland Hospital and Health Service Human Research Ethics Committee and began recruitment of 32 infants across the five sites. The infants will be followed up until 12 months corrected age to assess the effectiveness of the VISIBLE program on infants on vision awareness, motor, upper limb and cognitive development.
If you are considering that you have a child <6 months with high chance of cerebral palsy (based on GMA and HINE) and difficulties fixing or following objects, then we can arrange a formal assessment of vision function.
Contact details
For more information, please contact Dr Morgan Carlton, VISIBLE Clinical Research Coordinator
Ph: (07) 3069 7365 or E: qedincp@uq.edu.au
This project is funded by Cerebral Palsy Alliance research grant.
Chief Investigators: Prof. Roslyn Boyd, Prof. Andrea Guzzetta, Prof. Iona Novak, Dr Cathy Morgan, Dr Alison Salt, Prof. Glen Gole, Dr Swetha Philip, Dr Kerstin Pannek.