Who Does Vision Loss Affect?
Reviewed by: My Child Without Limits Advisory Committee November 2009 Nearly one out of every 1,000 children in the United States is affected by low vision. This means that more than 500,000 children in the U.S. have some type of vision impairment. About 58,000 of them are considered to be legally blind. Almost two thirds of children with vision impairment also have one or more other developmental disabilities — including cerebral palsy, mental retardation, epilepsy, or hearing loss. Approximately one third of these children had weighed 5½ pounds or less at birth. According to the National Eye Institute, vision disorders are the fourth most common type of disability in the United States and the most common disability among children. Breaking it down by specific disorder, two to five percent of children between the ages of three and five have amblyopia (commonly known as “lazy eye”), three to four percent have strabismus (crossed or misaligned eyes), and 10 to 15 percent have significa
