Recent Advances in Management of Amblyopia

Amblyopia is the most common cause of monocular vision loss in children. Global incidence is 3.7%. It may be due to early deprivation of vision or defocus in one eye, reflects an imbalance of input from the eyes to visual cortex .Not only monocular vision is reduced but binocular vision is also affected. Fellow Human brain is designed to allow both eyes to work together. If signals from one eye are blurred, brain blocks the visual input from that eye. In the visual pathway, the synapses are broken due to disuse of amblyopic eye. Along with visual coordination deficit, eye to hand and reading can be affected and selfperception may be diminished. A variety of amblyopia therapy options have been developed to treat amblyopia in children and adults. Amblyopia therapy options have traditionally been limited to penalization of non-amblyopic eye with either patching or medicinal penalization. Traditional approaches to diagnose and treatment have limited effectiveness, are uncomfortable for the patients and their families. Recent evidences shows that amblyopes possess binocular cortical mechanisms for both threshold and supra-threshold stimuli. Hence strategy may be based on binocular stimulation methods, aims to stimulate either eye leading to a concomitant improvement in monocular vision with reduction in suppression and strengthening of binocular vision.