Posted on 12/16/2022 2:59:21 PM PST by ConservativeMind
A new pilot study by researchers investigates the mechanisms that underlie a treatment for patients with amblyopia, also known as "lazy eye."
Amblyopia is a condition where the brain cannot recognize sight from one eye and favors the other eye. One therapy that shows promise for addressing the condition in adult patients is transient dark exposure, in which a patient has an occlusion that caused their amblyopia removed and lives in darkness for a few days.
Researchers found evidence that a week after transient dark exposure, the brain's neural networks adjust the way they process visual information thereby improving vision.
"One of the big things in neuroscience is to try to understand how we have stable perception," said Sandra Kuhlman. "The field is now able to identify adaptive properties of neural circuits on long time scales. That's really important to understand how neural function underlies basic sensory processes."
Brian Jeon, conceived the study.
"Transient dark exposure is a treatment that people are exploring in humans," Jeon said. "We said, 'hey, maybe this has to do with how the brain encodes information, and maybe that gets disrupted when you remove inputs for an extended period of time." We found there is some room for change, but actually, the system is very resilient."
"Brian's data helps shed light on the various, complex factors that drive plasticity in the visual cortex, and bring us one step closer to understanding how eye injury and disease might affect visual perception," said Steven Chase, professor of biomedical engineering and a co-author on the paper.
Though the mice exhibited some issues with visual processing within a few days after exposure, they recovered after a week.
(Excerpt) Read more at medicalxpress.com ...
Sounds better than operations to move eye muscles around!
“the brain’s neural networks adjust the way they process visual information thereby improving vision.”
Interesting and will see.
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I believe moving eye muscles for amblyopia is strictly a cosmetic fix. If it's proven to be viable, the 'dark therapy' described in the article will actually improve vision in the bad eye. That would be a major breakthrough in ophthalmology.
I used to work on diesels, so, as far as I’m concerned, if a person is too lazy to use his eye muscles, then he deserves what happens to his vision.
(just kidding, but they should give the condition a better nickname than ‘lazy eye’)
My friends family all had bad eyesight and lazy eyes and theyd put a eye patch on their kids for a week.
Did not they require kids with this to wear a patch over the good eye to strengthen the weak eye?
I remember an old PEANUTS cartoon in which a girl has to wear a black patch over her eye and a boy at school making fun of her. When asked why she was crying, she says...”I hurt my fist when I punched him in the nose.”
I have a severe case of this.
If I look out of both eyes I see double.
Could never hit 9r catch a ball.
Always the one left standing when picking teams.
They fought over who had to take me.
Problem is they are using adult mice with normal eye/visual cortex functioning to begin with and impairing it temporarily and then observing it comes back to baseline after a while. They are trying to compare that to an adult human that has had an impaired visual cortex since childhood/birth. It is an apples to oranges comparison. The human brain’s visual cortex loses its plasticity around 9 years of age, and doesn’t come back. Unless they find a way to construct and place new neurons (and putting someone in the dark won’t do that), the cure for adult amblyopia is a long way off.
Strabismus surgery can correct amblyopia in some children. You are right, in adults you are only fixing the strabismus, not the amblyopia (but fixing the strabismus can improve function depending on the severity of the amblyopia, not just cosmetics). As an aside-in adults with severe amblyopia the strabismus is likely to recur sooner.
After cataract surgery my right eye is lazy. It’s really hurt my pool game. And my parking ability.. I noticed the image is about 15% smaller than the one from my left eye. Can image size be corrected with a lens?
You may have this:
Aniseikonia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aniseikonia
It appears somewhat correctable.
Excellent, thank you. Right now my right eye is basically useless.
I had cataract surgery in both eyes, about a year and a half apart, and by different surgeons.
Corrective lenses were chosen and I could see very well with each eye, but no one thought to check for relative image size. I didn’t discover they were different until a year after surgery.
I’ll make an appointment at Costco and pay out of pocket. It takes too long going through insurance to get in to see my eye surgeon.
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