Amblyopia

Amblyopia or lazy eye is when an eye (or very rarely both) is not able to have a visual acuity of 100% (the vision may be very bad, even reaching 10%) when it has all the optical compensation and there is no pathology. Additionally, there is usually an imprecise focus at near, less contrast sensitivity, poor eye tracking movements, unstable fixation and little accuracy and increased sensitivity to the effect of contour interaction.

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The critical age for an eye to turn lazy is under 8 years old. The causes can be:

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1- Refractive: this eye is not stimulated correctly and the person should wear glasses or contact lenses. Also, it may happen that both eyes require optical correction and this sustained blurring over time slows down development.

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2- Visual deprivation: any opacity in the path of light rays that avoid forming a sharp image in the retina. The typical example is congenital cataract, but it is also worth mentioning the corneal opacities, congenital ptosis, ...

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3- Strabismus: when both eyes are not able to fix the image at the same time, double vision occurs. This is very unpleasant and the brain eliminates the central image of the deviating eye. This constant suppression ends up producing amblyopia

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The most important thing is to detect in the children as soon as possible the appearance of amblyopia. The faster, the easier it is to fix the problem.

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The treatment is to give all the optical correction, occlusion and visual therapy.