Binocular treatment strategies in amblyopia

Abstract

Amblyopia, a developmental disorder that resulted from physiological alterations on the visual cortex and the vision impairment early in life, is a consequence of an abnormal binocular experience during the critical period of visual system development called “neural plasticity period”. Such impairment causes not only a diminished visual acuity, but also other monocular problems, such as poor contrast sensitivity, or binocular ones like high degree of suppression of the amblyopic eye by the fellow eye and a poor or no stereopsis, which is associated with problems on fine and gross motor skills that impact negatively on the normal development of people’s daily life.
Being the most common cause of impaired vision during childhood and also from 1-4% of world’s population has amblyopia, the conventional treatment is not enough effective: amblyopia is not discovered on time and there is a poor compliance with patching/occlusion therapy in a great amount of cases. Thus, from a better understanding of the intervenient processes on the development of amblyopia, new binocular approaches have emerged on the last decade. The aim of this paper is to highlight basic aspects about amblyopia and review previous work about binocular therapies for treatment.