Abstract
Purpose :
To evaluate the effectiveness of binocularity-stimulating treatment in children with residual amblyopia following occlusion for more than 6 months.
Methods :
A retrospective chart review was performed in children with amblyopia caused by anisometropia, strabismus, or both. In patients with residual amblyopia following occlusion for more than 6 months, 3 types of binocularity-stimulating treatment were applied: Bangerter foil (BF), game using Head-mounted display (HMD), and combination of BF and HMD game (BF+HMD). Factors including age, sex, types of amblyopia, visual acuity, and duration of treatment were investigated. After at least two months of treatment, we compared the visual acuities at the baseline and those at the final follow-up.
Results :
A total of 22 patients were included and their average age was 8.7 ± 1.3 years. There were 7 patients with anisometropic amblyopia, 8 patients with strabismic amblyopia, and 7 patients with combined amblyopia. After average 4.4 ± 1.8 months of treatment, visual acuity in amblyopic eye was changed from 0.22 ± 0.20 LogMAR to 0.18 ± 0.15 LogMAR (p=0.252). Five patients (22.7%) presented more than two lines improvement in visual acuity: 1 patient (10%) among the 10 patients of BF group, 2 patients (28.6%) among the 7 patients of HMD group and 2 patients (40%) among the 5 patients of BF+HMD group (p=0.446). There were no significant differences in clinical features among the three groups.
Conclusions :
There may be a some benefit of the binocularity-stimulating treatment in amblyopic children. Binocularity-stimulating treatment might be attempted to the amblyopic children with no more response after the sufficient period of occlusion.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2017 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Baltimore, MD, May 7-11, 2017.