Keeping children with a lazy eye in the dark could help
them see better, research suggests. In ‘very exciting’ experiments, the vision of kittens
with the common condition lazy eye rapidly returned to normal after they were
kept in complete darkness for ten days. The Canadian researchers described the improvement as
‘startling’ and said the work paves the way for better treatment of
children.
Lazy eye, or amblyopia, affects one in 25
children. Problems with the connections between the eyes and brain lead to them
seeing better out of one eye than the other and lead to difficulty in seeing
detail and judging distances. Treatments, such as eye patches, are far from
perfect, partly because of difficulty in getting children to comply with them,
and, left untreated, the condition can cause blindness in one eye.
