A groundbreaking research has shown that a daily hour on computer games may actually help to treat a lazy eye or amblyopia. The difference in sight between the two eyes leads to abnormal development of the visual centers of the brain and, if left untreated, can cause permanent sight problems.
The traditional treatment for a lazy eye is an eye patch over the good eye in order to strengthen a lazy eye to work harder. But that treatment can escort to hounding, therefore these patches are removed quiet often by adolescents who cannot manage the poor vision from their lazy eye.
Dr Anita Simmers and colleagues from Glasgow Caledonian University carried out a study including fourteen children with amblyopia. They were asked to play a computer game similar to Tetris while wearing gaming goggles. The gaming goggles work accordingly that the falling Tetris blocks could only be seen using the left eye and the wall the blocks fell into were only visible from the right eye.
To win the game, both eyes had to be working hard. The results were very surprising with fifty-four percent of study participants restored their vision instantly after five hours of the treatment. About half of study participants had improved their 3D vision and twenty percent being provided with depth perception for the first time.
Lead author Dr Simmers, stated this is a tremendously heartening study. To treat a lazy eye using a patch it is required to get children to do forceful visual work because if you use the eye it will get better. But it was very difficult to get young children to do that.
But, it is much easier to get a child to sit for an hour in front of a computer game. Researchers had managed to help children to see better, to get more depth in their view and to make motor tasks easier for them. Up to four in on hundred children are born with amblyopia, happen because of a misalignment of the eyes.
Dr Simmers added generally any treatment given comes earlier, prior to a child turns seven. If children treated very young, the damage was thought to be irreversible. The fact these children have improved vision shows the potential to use both eyes and that the brain can continue to learn new ways of seeing well beyond the childhood years.
The research was published in the journal Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science.