Footnotes

• Contributors ACB drafted and revised the manuscript for content, and acquired and analyzed the data. G.T. Plant conceived the study, acquired and analyzed the data, revised the manuscript for content.

• Competing interests None.

• Ethics approval Moorfields Eye Hospital ethics committee.

• Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

• ↵i In some cultures, the noise is rather seen as black bugs on a white background and described, for example, in Scandinavian countries as ‘war of the ants’. It should also be noted that the reference to TV in this syndrome may become less common because contemporary digital displays produce noise which is less random and often revert to a blue screen if there is no signal.