Watching movies, animated films helps improve eyesight in kids with amblyopia

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Amblyopia is a medical condition in which vision in one or both eyes is decreased due to abnormal development of eyesight during infancy or childhood, according to the American Association for Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus. Commonly called "lazy eye", amblyopia is most common cause of visual impairment among children.

According to the National Eye Institute, amblyopia affects 2 to 3 of every 100 kids. It is commonly treated by patching the strong eye in order to enhance the weaker eye's ability to function properly.

A recent study published in the Journal of the American Association for Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus showed that dichoptic therapy combined with popular children's movies is effective in improving vision in young kids suffering from amblyopia.

EurekAlert reports that dichoptic techniques together with perceptual-learning tasks or simple games have proven to effectively improve visual acuity significantly in amblyopia. But this type of therapy has its downfalls, as kids find the tasks intensive and repetitive, and as much as 40 percent of unsupervised patients do not comply. Researchers then came up with a new way to engage kids through popular animated films and complementary dichoptic stimulation to keep them interested.

Researchers studied eight amblyopic children ages 4 to 10 who watched three dichoptic movies weekly for two weeks. Each eye viewed an image with irregularly shaped blobs that masked different parts of the movie. These blobs were actually inverse images of those seen by the other eye, making the whole screen visible only with binocular vision, which can form a complete picture by reducing the contrast of the image for the stronger eye.

According to lead investigator Eileen E. Birch, PhD, of the Retina Foundation of the Southwest, and the UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, "Children achieved 1-4 lines of improvement in visual acuity with just six sessions (nine hours) of dichoptic (both eyes looking at target at same time) movie viewing over two weeks."

She explained, "Patching, by comparison, requires 120 hours of treatment to achieve 1 line of improvement in amblyopic children who have already been treated with spectacles for 12-16 weeks."

According to Medical Daily, a similar clinical trial held last year on dichoptic video game therapy among adults with amblyopia showed that it improved eyesight better than those who wore an eye patch. Results in a study conducted on children showed similar results, which led researchers to conclude that dichoptic therapy may be used as an alternative for other therapies in the future.

Dr. Birch said, "If the feature film approach has efficacy similar to the contrast-balanced perceptual learning tasks and games, it may lead to home-based binocular amblyopia therapy with greater compliance. Dichoptic feature films could be useful as a primary, supplemental, or maintenance treatment for amblyopia."