The Journal of the American Medicine Association published a study that linked a binocular iPad game to treatment of amblyopia in children. Amblyopia, commonly known as lazy eye, affects three percent of people in the U.S. and is the primary reason for monocular visual impairment in children.
Traditionally, doctors treat lazy eye by patching the patient’s healthy eye in order to force them to make their unhealthy eye stronger. Although patching has been the standard course of care to treat lazy eye, it does not always restore perfect 20/20 vision.
Although amblyopia only affects vision in one eye, at its core, it is a binocular discordance disease. However, limited studies have been done to demonstrate the effectiveness of binocular treatment as compared to patching. Researcher Krista Kelly of the Retina Foundation of the Southwest and her colleagues decided to test out the possibility of binocular treatment.
In the study, Kelly randomly assigned 28 children to two treatments: patching and playing an action-oriented adventure iPad game.
The children played the game for one hour a day, five days a week for a total of two weeks. The children wore special glasses that separate game elements seen by each eye.
In order to successfully play the game, both eyes must be able to determine different game components. After two weeks, all children who participated in the study returned for a 12-week visit.
After testing for the amblyopic eye’s best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA), it was found that there was a greater improvement in the amblyopic eye in the binocular game condition than in the patching condition.
Out of the 13 children who completed binocular treatment condition, five reached a 20/32 or better visual acuity. This was compared to one out of 14 children in the patching condition.
This study showed that the improvement in BCVA was more than double the improvement found in patching.
“We show that in just two weeks, visual acuity gain with binocular treatment was half that found with six months of patching, suggesting that binocular treatment may yield faster gains than patching. Whether long-term binocular treatment is as effective in remediating amblyopia as patching remains to be investigated,” Kelly said in a press release.
After the two week check in, the children in the patching condition also switched to play the binocular game. Two weeks later, all subjects had an improvement in BCVA, and there was no significant group difference in the children who began playing the game later.
The study demonstrated that binocular games are a potential option for the treatment of amblyopia. Further studies are needed to determine if this treatment option is effective in the long-term.
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