Acceptance of correct visual acuity prescription after counseling in patients with Anisometropia

Abstract

Anisometropia is the condition in which the two eyes have unequal refractive power, one eye may be markedly stronger than the other and it is significant cause of amblyopia. The anomaly is found in every possible variety; one eye may be emmetropic and its fellow eye of any other denomination, hypermetropic, myopic or astigmatic; or both eyes may be ametropic.1 A difference in power of two diopters or more is the accepted threshold to label the condition anisometropia. In certain types of anisometropia, the visual cortex of the brain will not use both eyes together (binocular vision), and will instead suppress the central vision of one of the eyes. If this occurs often enough during the first 10 years of life while the visual cortex is developing, it can result in lazy eye (amblyopia), a condition where even when correcting the refractive error properly, the person is still not correctable to 20/20.2 Children who have anisometropia, a difference in refractive error between their two eyes, are known to be at risk of amblyopia.3 Furthermore, most investigators have reported that the greater the magnitude of the anisometropia, the more severe the amblyopia tends to be.4 Because anisometropic amblyopia is treatable in childhood, with optical correction alone or accompanied by patching or penalization of the nonamblyopic eye, eye care professionals advocate methods for detection of anisometropia in young children.5 Amblyopia is unilateral or bilateral decrease in best corrected visual acuity by formed vision deprivation and abnormal binocular interaction for which there is no pathology of eye and visual pathway.6 Amblyopia is a developmental visual disorder characterized by abnormal form vision and binocular functions.7