ABSTRACT
I feel very honored to be invited to present the 6th ESA lecture, joining such prominent strabismus researchers and ESA-lecturers as Joseph Lang, Peter Fells, Gunter von Noorden, Emilio Campos and Guntram Kommerell. I have chosen to speak about eye muscle studies and how they relate to strabismus. In the incomitant strabismus, i.e. the paralytic and mechanic types, eye muscle function is clearly affected. However, in the common types of concomitant strabismus any changes in eye muscle structure and function are less obvious. I will review my own and others research on eye muscles over a couple of decades up to the present time, to see if the results can shed some light on issues concerning particularly the concomitant strabismus. The human extra ocular muscles (EOM) show morphological and functional properties that are different in many aspects from ordinary skeletal, striated muscles in the human body. The traditional fiber type classification cannot be applied to the EOM, and the assumptions concerning their structure and function can only partly be based on data from other skeletal muscles. These differences are probably of importance in explaining why the eye muscles are involved in some diseases where other skeletal muscle is spared, and vice versa, but this is outside the topic of this presentation.
