In monocular amblyopia, cortices related to spatial vision underwent volume loss, which provided neuroanatomical evidence of stereoscopic defects. Additionally, white matter development was also hindered due to visual defects in amblyopes. Growth in the GMVs, WMVs and FA in the occipital lobe and precuneus may reflect a compensation effect by the unaffected eye in monocular amblyopia.
Structural changes of the brain have been detected in many early-onset eye diseases, whereas little is known about whether changes could occur if the onset age is after the sensitive development period. High Myopia is a prime example of neural plasticity after development, whose case history is usually long. To investigate potential morphological changes in the brain of high myopic patients, we compared a group of 30 adults with high myopia and 30 control subjects using high-resolution anatomic MRI in combination with vision tests. No difference in gray matter (GM) concentration was detected. However, increased concentration of white matter (WM) was observed in patients with high myopia, primarily in the calcarine area. Another three comparatively smaller regions were in the prefrontal and parietal lobe. It can be inferred that cortices developed normally and refractive error in high myopic patients may be compensated by strengthening the correlation between visual cortex and visual related areas. Our study suggests that besides early-onset diseases, the late-onset eye diseases can also affect the structure of brain.
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