Amblyopia also known as lazy eyes. It’s a type of vision development disarray in which an eye fails to achieve normal visual sharpness, even when the person is wearing the prescribed eye lenses or the eyeglasses. It generally begins during infancy and in childhood stage. It normally affects only one eye but in some cases, it can reduce the visual sharpness in both the eyes. Particularly when these kinds of symptoms are not treated early lazy eye can lead to severe visual disability in the affected eyes and can even include blindness. It is one of the common problems in children.

Symptoms of Amblyopia

Due to the typical problem development in the infants, symptoms, and conditions can be a bit difficult to discriminate. If you notice your baby or young child has crossed eyes or some kind of apparent eye misalignment, schedule an appointment with the ophthalmologist who specializes in children’s vision. Another clue that your child is having the problem of amblyopia is when he or she creates a fuss when one of their eyes is covered. You can try this simple do viewing test at home by simply covering and uncovering your child’s eye one by one when he or she is performing some visual activity such as watching television.

However, a simple screening test at home is not a substitute for a comprehensive eye exam. Get your child examined as recommended to make sure that the child has a normal vision of both the eye and they function properly as a team.

Causes of Amblyopia

1. Strabismic Amblyopia: It is the most common cause of the amblyopia. To keep away from the double vision caused by the poorly aligned eyes, the brain pay no attention to the visual input from the misaligned eye, leading to the problem in that eye.
2. Refractive amblyopia: Cause of the problem is caused by the unequal refractive errors in the two eyes, despite perfect alignment of the eyes. For example one eye of the person is having a significant uncorrected nearsightedness or farsightedness, while the other eye is having normal vision. Or thee cause may be significant astigmatism and the other eye does not have any problem.
3. Deprivation amblyopia: This is a lazy eye caused by something that obstructs light from entering and being focused in the baby’s eyes, such as cataract that is congenital. Prompt treatment of that cataract is necessary to allow normal vision development of the child.

Treatment of the Amblyopia

In some cases, normal eye vision can be accomplished by simply fully correcting the refractive error in both the eyes with glasses or contact lenses. However, sometimes it needs patching of the normal eye to force the brain to pay attention to visual input from the amblyopic eye and that enables normal vision development to occur in that eyes.

Treatment of the strabismic amblyopia is by the strabismus surgery to straighten the eyes and then this is followed by eye patching and also sometimes it requires vision therapy to help both eyes to work together as a team.