image: Figure 1. Quantitative comparison of the results of patching alone and 30 h AMTP plus patching, both over a 3-month period. As shown in Figure 1A and 1B, both protocols produced improvement of VA in the AE and significant reduction in IAD (Figure 1C and 1D), but in the group treated with AMTP the changes were larger, of higher statistical significance, and exceeded both criteria for successful treatment (Figure 1E and 1F). view more
Credit: ©Science China Press
Amblyopia is a common visual disorder in children, with an incidence of close to 3%. Hippocrates described the condition of amblyopic patients as early as 480 BC, but it was not until the middle of the 8th century AD that Turkish scientist Thabit ibn Qurrah ibn Marwan al-Harrani discovered that it was possible to patch the good eye on the opposite side to improve the vision of the amblyopic eye. Despite the rapid development of science and technology in the long years since then, the occlusion therapy has been used by ophthalmologists worldwide as the gold standard for the treatment of amblyopia. This therapy is effective, but there are problems such as a long course of treatment, and the effect of compliance is greatly affected. On the one hand, children are unwilling to cover their eyes for a long time, and on the other hand, it is difficult for children to concentrate on using amblyopic eyes for a long time to complete the specified eye training. Therefore, it is necessary to seek for a more effective treatment for amblyopia.
Prof. Mingliang Pu’s research group at School of Basic Medicine, Peking University and Prof. Xiaoqing Li’s clinical research team at Pediatric Ophthalmology Department of First affiliated Hospital, Peking University have jointly verified through a series of basic and clinical experiments that asynchronized dichoptic binocular visual stimulation can regulate the synaptic plasticity of binocular cells in the primary visual cortex and optimize visual response characteristics of these neurons; and improve the visual acuity of the amblyopic eyes. In response to the challenge of conventional occlusion and compulsive eye treatment, the research team designed a treatment plan for amblyopia using asynchronized stimulation mode (3D movie/cartoon visual stimulation). It was verified in children with anisometropic amblyopia. This pristine movie therapy has obvious advantages compared with the conventional occlusion and training therapy: 1. The visual acuity improvement is faster and the treatment course is shorter; 2. The children do not need to passively complete the training tasks. As they watching preferred cartoon movies, they are unwittingly receiving personized therapeutic treatment. The compliance is significantly better, and the burden of supervision on parents is significantly reduced. Recently, related research results were published in Science China Life Sciences under the title of "New treatment for amblyopia based on rules of synaptic plasticity: a randomized clinical trial".
In this clinical study, patients with anisometropic amblyopia were randomly divided into two groups: the control group was treated with the conventional patching method, and the experimental group was treated with the patching plus watching asynchronized 3D movies. As shown in the figure, after three months of treatment, the improvement in best corrected visual acuity of the experimental group was much better than that of the control group. The children participating in the experiment group showed excellent compliance, and parents expressed their willingness to accept this treatment mode. Compared with other treatments, this therapy is much easier to implement in children with amblyopia.
This research was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program (2011CB510206, 2015CB351806), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31170986, 31571091), the Beijing Municipal Natural Science Foundation (Z151100000915070).
See the article:
X., Huang, H., Xia, Q., Zhang et al., (2022). New treatment for amblyopia based on rules of synaptic plasticity: a randomized clinical trial, in press, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11427-021-2030-6.
Journal
Science China Life Sciences