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Author(s)

Heydi Segundo Tabares

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Instituto de Psicologia (IP/SBD)
• Defense date: 2020-04-15

Examining board members

Marcelo Fernandes da Costa; Francisco Max Damico; Givago da Silva Souza

• Advisor: Marcelo Fernandes da Costa

Abstract

The Zika virus is an emerging arbovirus that is transmitted by mosquitoes of the genus Aedes. The infection, which is clinically characterized as an acute, very nonspecific febrile syndrome similar to dengue, is associated with changes in the nervous system as well as microcephaly in the newborn. Child development is a continuous and very dynamic process that includes many functions as vision. The evolution of vision begins in intrauterine life and continues after birth. The intra-uterus period is essentially important for the child\'s future visual development. Thus, the changes caused by the infection by Zika have been shown to have an impact on the child\'s future development. One way of assessing the human visual system is by evaluating the contrast sensitivity function. FSC describes the performance of the visual system at different levels of contrasts. In this research, the contrast sensitivity function is evaluated in infants whose mothers presented Zika virus during pregnancy. Were tested 77 children aged 2 to 24 months, half of these children will be part of the control group. The contrast sensitivity function was evaluated through Psykinematix Psychophysics Program. A complete descriptive test was performed for each group and age group. Comparative analyzes between the groups were performed based on the differences between the individual values of the control and exposed groups, using one-way analysis of variance. Correlations between age and contrast sensitivity were performed by Spearman Rank Order test for each group and spatial frequencies. Comparing the exposed group and the infected group we found no statistical difference for any of the spatial frequencies. We performed a correlation between age and value of sensitivity to the contrast for the frequencies tested. Preliminary data showed a moderate significant correlation between age and contrast sensitivity values for the 0.6 cpg (r = 0.45, p<0.05) for the exposed group. Our method proved to be na effective tool for studies od luminance spatial contrast sensivity in this population. The development of methods for measuring visual function in infants and nonverbal children is of great importance, as there is little availability of behavioral methodology for this age group. The development of this measurement program allowed us to perform contrast sensitivity assessments in infants and children with Zika virus, discussed in the next section of this discussion. Another result that shows the robustness of our study is that the results of our measurements are similar to measurements made on babies of this age by other researchers for the same spatial frequencies. We conclude that the contrast sensitivity measurements in infants exposed to Zika virus showed no reduction in contrast sensitivity compared to unexposed infants (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 16/21573-7 - Visual Evaluarion of newborn babies intra utero infected by Zika virus
• Grantee: Heydi Segundo Tabares
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master