Why amblyopia (lazy eye) cannot be surgically or anyhow treated at adulthood? I know that if treated properly at childhood that eye can function normally, but why is it hard to develop it later?
In: Biology
I have a lazy eye that drifts toward center. My eye doctor says a lazer treatment can straighten it but he won’t do it because it’s too risky.
When I was 8 years old my right eye was injured and the lens had to be surgically removed. As this was 1990 we didn’t have the tech to implant anything so I was fitted with a corrective contact lens that gave me about 100/20 vision. Enough to easily identify an object and maintain stereoscopic sight but not enough that I felt unhindered. Being young I’m sure you can imagine how well wearing a contact that had to be removed nightly went. I hated it. My middle school I was barely wearing it. Eventually that eye began to drift. By high school it was nearly set but strenuous activity would somehow align it. Vision in that eye is SEVERELY limited. It’s pretty much good for detecting light and very large objects. It’s also much more sensitive to light period and the strangest side effect is that I can now see “black” lights as very bright purple objects. Anyway… So now I’m in my late 30’s not really self-conscious about it but I’ve asked my eye doc about it when being measured for glasses to treat my near-sighted left eye. He said there is surgery available to align it and there are now also implants I can get that would allow some ability to focus on near and far objects. He never once mentioned age being a thing for the alignment surgery.
After a little reading on google, amblyopia(lazy eye) can be treated in adults, with a combo of prescription glasses, vision therapy, etc.; the misconception however comes from research done with kittens by Torsten Wiesel and David Hubel, being misinterpreted.
As someone with a lazy eye, I’ve been explained the disease a lot lol. The thing is, a lazy eye is NOT a disease. It’s literally your optical nerve being too lazy to work properly. You can train it back into functioning as a child by forcing it to work with an eyepatch, but the older you get the less likely you’re gonna succeed at de-atropy-ing it into health. Hope it helps!
Just to be clear, amblyopia doesn’t refer to a visible misalignment of the eyes or something along those lines, although that can be a *cause* of amblyopia.
The issue itself arises from development of the brain and its not utilizing the affected eye sufficiently. It can occur with no structural problem in the eye at all. So the problem isn’t that something in the eye needs to be fixed, rather, for some reason the portion of the brain that eye stimulates wasn’t properly stimulated and didn’t develop normally.
We don’t have a good ‘surgical’ or other treatment for brain development, outside of “catch the root cause early while the brain is still developing, and fix that, so the brain develops correctly”
The brain is naturally ~~lazy~~ efficient. If it’s getting bad information from the opic nerve in the lazy eye, it’ll choose to ignore and favor the good eye. As a person gets older, the brain may completely cut off information from that nerve, even if the lazy eye is fixed surgically.
You want to treat the lazy eye early before a person ages enough that the brain cuts off signal from the lazy eye.
Latest Answers