It is a major cause of severe visual loss after blunt or penetrating head trauma. After the initial injury, an edema of the optic nerve within the optic nerve canal can cause secondary loss of retinal ganglion cells.

Treatment: It has a primarily clinical diagnosis and has been treated in recent years with high doses of intravenous corticosteroids, but its efficacy is not very safe. However, subsequent studies lead to the conclusion that there is a relatively high proportion of cases with spontaneous visual recovery in all series.