What is a Lazy Eye?
The problem with the lazy eye is the defect between the back of the eyeball and the brain. While laser refractive surgery will correct any short-sightedness or long-sightedness associated with their lazy eye, it would not rectify the actual problems, the connection between the brain out of sight.
Treatment Strategies
Lazy eye treatments typically work better in young children, mainly when under the age of about eight or nine years old.
While the brain still has more neural plasticity, that’s the brains’ ability to grow, change and learn new things. However, there are reported cases and many studies showing that older children and some adults will have improved visual outcomes utilizing different treatment strategies.
It is recommended not to diagnose or treat lazy eye or amblyopia without management or guidance from an eye care professional.
Because the lazy eye is essentially a neurological condition, there is the potential to overshoot or be over-treated and therefore cost more damage.
The treatment strategies are often tailored and personalized based on the type and severity of the treatment, but they usually involve a combination of the following treatments.
One would be some form of glasses or other optical correction, two would be some form of patching or occlusion therapy, three would be vision therapy, also known as VT, or some form of eye surgery.
How Effective is Amblyopia Treatment?
In most cases, the first goal of amblyopia treatment is to equalize the visual signal of each eye, and you can do that through an updated glass. Often this requires what’s called cycloplegic refraction. We’ll use eye drops in the clinic to remove fully relaxed eye muscles internally inside the eye, which will help the doctor better understand the entire visual demand of each of the eyes.
Whatever using these drops does take a little more time so expect that this type of exam may take longer than your typical routine eye exam.
Thankfully in many of these cases, amblyopia will improve with just glasses prescription alone, and that’s why doctors will often start off prescribing glasses and then having someone like a child come back several weeks later to verify and check on the visual acuity see.
If things have leveled out but for much more deep-seated cases where one eye is much worse than the other eye, and it’s not getting better with these glasses alone, will often prescribe some eye patching.
How Far Does it Help Treat Lazy Eyes?
You’ll see kids wearing eye patches, or perhaps they’ll be treated with eye drops to blur vision or using some other penalization technique to use their other weaker eye better. That will help build stronger neural connections in the individual cortex to enhance the image again in that week early.
Unfortunately, Lasik surgery is not a good treatment for amblyopia, especially something that needs to be treated before six years of age.
If, as an adult, you are contemplating laser eye surgery and having an underlying squint, it is recommended for you to carry out the laser eye surgery before having any squint treatment.
The lazy eye is not much of a problem with regard as it is an issue and how the brain has learned to the vision-affected eye.
So it’s much more of a neurological condition. Having a lazy eye or amblyopia means that the affected eye cannot see 20/20 or just very well in general.
What Happens in Lazy Eye Problems?
Frequently leaving one eye very clear and sharp while the other eye sees everything very blurry, and that’s even with the very best optical correction.
That means not with glasses or with contacts. And many people keep on asking if that could get LASIK to correct lazy eye, and unfortunately, know that doesn’t work either because it’s not again a problem with the regard as it is a problem with the visual processing centers of the brain.
Getting in Depth
To better understand how lazy eye is a neurological issue, consider home people are right and left-handed.
They are having a few different ailments with the eyes. Most commonly, people will think of lazy eyes, somebody having an eye turn where the eye may turn inward toward the nose, or maybe, it will turn outward away from the other eye and then the clinic.
In cases of this wandering eye, that person may often see double for a short period, but the brain will constantly adapt, starting to suppress or shut off those wandering eyes.
So that they can focus better with a good eye, and in those cases, it’s the same thing their brain starts to develop more neurological connections with the excellent better-seeing eye, therefore, resulting in amblyopia and although this happens more rarely.
How Does the Problem of Lazy Eyes Occur?
Children born with congenital cataracts or some other ocular deformity include their vision.
They can also develop a severe form of a family opiate. Frequently amblyopia will grow due to uncorrected refractive error. We call that refractive amblyopia, and that is where somebody will have an eye that just isn’t being corrected with glasses or contacts at a young age. The difference between those two eyes will cause the brain to develop a more neural connection for the better-seeing eye leaving the weaker eye to kind of fall behind.
What Causes this Kind of Occurrence?
It can occur due to nearsightedness and astigmatism. It could happen in just one eye or both eyes and extreme cases most often, though. We see it and children who have an eye that is more hyperopic or far-sighted than the other eye. And unfortunately, it does not take that much of a difference to end up with this type of amblyopia.
Even more unfortunate is that small children do not speak up to their parents about having poor eyesight. They just haven’t learned what good vision really is and isn’t, and how often do you see a kid walking around testing their vision between their right and left? It just doesn’t happen.
Why is it Necessary to Rectify Diseases Earlier?
That’s one of the reasons why it’s recommended that young children have an eye examination with an eye care professional between the ages of six and twelve months of life again around the age of three, and then again around the age of five or six or before entering kindergarten or sooner.
If a doctor recommends, that’s important because children identified with his condition can be treated, and treatment is better when performed earlier.
