Effect of blue-light filtering on multifocal visual-evoked potentials

Purpose: To perform an objective functional assessment of the impact of blue-light filters on cortical processing to evaluate the potential side effects of the filters on higher tier visual function at the neural level.

Setting: Department of Ophthalmology, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany.

Design: Cohort study.

Methods: Multifocal pattern-reversal visual-evoked potentials (multifocal VEPs) were recorded monocularly in pseudophakic patients with a clear intraocular lens (IOL) under 2 conditions: (1) stimulus perception through a yellow filter with the filter characteristics of an AF-1 YA-60BB IOL (blue filtering); (2) stimulus perception through a neutral filter that homogeneously attenuates the effective stimulus intensity as under the blue-light filtering condition but independent of the wavelength (neutral filtering). Second-order kernel multifocal VEPs were extracted for 60 visual field locations, and amplitude and latency effects were determined for 6 stimulus eccentricities.

Results: The study evaluated 20 patients. Typical multifocal VEPs were obtained for the blue-light and neutral filtering conditions at all eccentricities. No significant effects on amplitudes were obtained, and a subtle latency effect (<0.5 millisecond delay for neutral filtering; P<.02) did not reach significance in an eccentricity-specific analysis.

Conclusions: The induced short-term change in the spectral composition of the visual stimulus left neural activity at the level of the primary visual cortex largely unaffected, providing an objective account of the integrity of visual processing under this condition.