Pioneering trial offers hope for late treatment of 'lazy eye' (Patch strong eye and increase acetylcholine with Aricept—even adults)

Medical Xpress / Children's Hospital Boston / Scientific Reports ^ | Sept. 12, 2023 | Nancy Fliesler / Carolyn Wu et al

[ConservativeMind]

In children with amblyopia or "lazy eye," one eye is weaker than the other. As a result, the brain starts to favor input from the stronger eye, causing the weaker eye to lose vision.

If amblyopia is caught early enough, putting a patch over the dominant eye teaches the brain to pay attention to the weaker eye, strengthening its vision. Unfortunately, this strategy works best until about age 5 or 6. After that, the "critical period" when the brain can rewire its visual circuits begins to close, and vision loss is hard to reverse.

But it turns out certain drugs can reopen this critical period. In 2010, neuroscientist Takao Hensch, Ph.D. reported that drugs like donepezil (Aricept), a medication used for Alzheimer's disease, reversed amblyopia in a mouse model well after the visual critical period ended.

Donepezil boosts levels of acetylcholine, was already being prescribed to enhance cognition.

They ultimately enrolled 16 participants averaging 16 years of age, ranging from nine to 37.

Before receiving donepezil, children under 18 patched their weak eye for four weeks, at least two hours daily. (Adults were spared this requirement to encourage them to enroll.) After this run-in period, the children took 2.5 mg of donepezil daily while continuing to patch, while adults took 5 mg. If, at four weeks, vision hadn't improved by at least one line (or five letters) on the eye chart, the dose was increased. Doses were capped at 7.5mg for children and 10mg for adults.

After 12 weeks of treatment, participants could read, on average, 1.2 more lines in an eye chart than when they started. While some did not respond, four of the 16 had improvements of two lines or greater. The visual improvements remained ten weeks after cessation of donepezil, in both children and adults.

[nagant]

Your assessment of the “Cochran” analysis is fair. However, you don’t present an assessment or disclaimer of the flawed study which you posted.

I did not specify that the kind of surety offered by your Cochran analysis of double blind placebo studies is required for veracity. I only said that veracity of this study requires its ability to isolate the causes and effects which it studies. There are far too many studies with similar inability to isolate causes and effects. Global warming is but one example of where an overt collection of these false studies has left a large portion of the population with a totally false conclusion.

This entire trend needs to be discredited as fake science.

In testing cancer treatments for cancers which have no known cures placebo studies are not indicated because there are no known cures and because time causes death. Then numbers of successful treatments will then bear out a drug’s efficacy. Lazy eye does not display these factors.

Yes, my opinion is that N=1 self studies likely would not present much risk. But I’m not a physician and apparently neither or you. This study isn’t capable of confirming or rejecting our hypothesis.

There’s no reason to remove this flawed study, but my assessment of this study still stands.

[ConservativeMind]

The studies present what was available. Other studies may follow. It is not fake science, in any form. It is science.

You may want more proof, while others don’t. So?

Take the best of what is available and run with it, to the extent you and your doctors want to.

[jacquej]

You have been there and done that too?

I am very suspicious, since the Pfizer/Moderna debacle. It is hard to trust big pharma these days.