Colorado Visual Snow Survey 2.0

Abstract. Visual snow syndrome (VSS) is a condition in which people experience a continuous overlay of small dots atop their entire visual field. As a newly recognized condition, there is a gap in patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) that target VSS symptom impact. We sought to assess the Colorado Visual Snow Survey 2.0 (CVSS) as a possible PROM for VSS. In a convenience sample of undergraduate students and people with VSS recruited through the Visual Snow Initiative (N = 144), we found the CVSS (1) strongly differentiated people with VSS from healthy controls, (2) demonstrated high internal consistency, and (3) aside from visual static, the degree of night vision impairment, blue field entoptic phenomenon, and afterimages, and tinnitus (in that order) best predicted group membership. Overall, CVSS is a promising PROM that warrants further validation.

You can find the anonymized data and code on OSF along with a pre-print of the accepted paper. This project was funded by the Visual Snow Initiative and the Eye on Vision Foundation.

Although I do not intend to pursue clinical research in the future, this project is important to me for three reasons. Firstly, I have VSS, so to conduct formal research into this condition that I experienced my entire life was somewhat cathartic (lol). Secondly, this project started as my undergraduate honors thesis, where I tried to use psychophysics to identify a relationship between face perception and severity of VSS–to mostly null results. Instead, the project turned into something else, where we revised and assessed the validity of the CVSS. Thirdly, this is my first publication! Woohoo!