What is lazy eye?
Lazy eye, also known as amblyopia, is a vision development disorder in which an eye fails to achieve normal acuity, even with prescription
glasses’ or contact lenses. Lazy eye occurs early in life and can prevent your child from developing normal visual acuity in the affected eye.
There are treatments for the underlying causes of lazy eye. If detected and treated early, poor vision from the lazy eye can be avoided. Amblyopia typically begins during infancy and early childhood. In most cases, only one eye is affected. But in some cases, amblyopia can occur in both eyes.
If lazy eye is detected early in life and promptly treated, reduced vision can be avoided, but untreated lazy eye can cause permanent loss of vision in the affected eye.
Symptoms
Lazy eye can be hard to detect as its typically a problem in infant vision development. The easiest way to identify lazy eye are:
- Misalignment of the eyes, a condition called strabismus. If your child has crossed eyes or some other apparent eye misalignment, make an appointment for one of our optometrists to check it out.
- If your child cries or fusses when you cover an eye, covering one at a time, you may find they cry when you cover the good eye
- Poor depth perception
- Repeated eye closure or squinting
- Eyes that don’t move in the same direction when your child is trying to focus
Causes of lazy eye
There are 3 causes of lazy eye:
- Strabismic amblyopia, which is the most common cause of lazy eye. To avoid double vision caused by poorly aligned eyes, the brain will ignore the visual input from the misaligned eye, leading to amblyopia in that eye (the lazy eye).
- Refractive amblyopia – sometimes it is caused by unequal refractive errors in the two eyes, despite perfect eye alignment. For example, one may have significant short-sightedness or long-sightedness and the other is not. Or one has a significant astigmatism, and the other eye does not. In such cases, the brain relies on the eye that has less uncorrected refractive error and tunes out the blurred vision from the other eye, causing amblyopia in that eye from disuse.
- Deprivation amblyopia – this type of amblyopia is caused by something that obstructs light from entering and being focused in a baby’s eye, such as congenital cataract. Prompt treatment of congenital cataracts with cataract surgery is necessary to allow normal development to occur.
Treatment of lazy eye
Treatment methods depends on the severity of the condition and patient preference, which our optometrists will discuss with you. An example of such is:
- Corrective lenses and glasses – for the cases of refractive amblyopia, normal vision can be achieved simply by fully correcting the refractive error in both eyes with glasses or contact lenses
- Strabismus surgery – treatment of strabismus amblyopia often involves strabismus surgery, followed by use of an eye patch on the dominant eye and some form of vision therapy to help both eyes work together equally as a team.
If you are concerned about your child’s vision, book an appointment with us today.