Outcome of conventional treatment for adult amblyopia

Abstract

Conventional treatment may improve the visual acuity of amblyopic eyes even in adult patients.

The good (logMAR), the bad (Snellen) and the ugly (BCVA, number of letters read) of visual acuity measurement

“…Many papers report measuring VA with a Snellen chart and then analyse the data after converting it to logMAR . Snellen charts have an irregular progression in size and are often truncated, so that the data may not follow a normal distribution and parametric analyses might be best avoided .…”

“…This is not changed merely by converting the data to logMAR. The conversion of Snellen data to logMAR can also be misleading as the abstract and results sections of papers that use this process sometimes give the impression that data have been collected using logMAR charts suggesting the data are more reliable that they actually are …”

A comparison of tests for quantifying sensory eye dominance

“…There is increasing interest in the feasibility of treating amblyopia in older children and adults, either with occlusion therapy (Erdem, Cinar et al 2011, Kishimoto, Fujii et al 2014 or other 475 monocular (Evans, Yu et al 2011) and/or binocular methodologies, such as dichoptic training and videogame play (Tsirlin, Colpa et al 2015). Based on the idea that interocular suppression is a cause not a symptom of amblyopia it has been proposed that binocular treatments achieve their results by reducing interocular suppression.…”

Optical treatment of amblyopia in older children and adults is essential prior to enrolment in a clinical trial

“…22 Optical treatment alone in adults has not been comprehensively evaluated. However, a number of studies have demonstrated that adults can improve from combination therapies involving spectacle correction plus part-time occlusion, [23][24][25] occlusion augmented by videogame play, 26,27 perceptual learning, 28,29 and binocular treatments. 30,31 One study of dichoptic videogame treatment performed by Vedamurthy, Nahum & Huang et al 30 noted three adults who improved to near-normal visual acuity 6-8 weeks after updating refractive correction, but no clinical details were reported.…”