I have lived my entire life with an eye disorder called “Amblyopia”. As a young child, I wore a black patch over my right eye in order to help restore vision in my “lazy” left eye. My siblings endured the same frustrating “pirate patch” remedy, which did not work for any of us.
There is quite a family history of this amblyopic eye in my father and three of my four brothers. There were also some old family photos of my grandfather, on my father’s side, wearing a patch over his left eye.
Having never seen the world through two good eyes, I have no idea what I am missing. Depth perception is one thing that troubles me, especially when driving, but I have learned to compensate for it simply by understanding that I don’t always see exactly the way I should. I am careful when I drive and don’t do much nighttime driving because of the problem with depth perception.
I have been told that there is no cure for the problem, which really isn’t an eye problem at all. It has more to do with how the brain functions. Apparently there is a small window during early childhood when neural transmitters are soft and pliable, hence the use of the patch. Because the window is so small, most of the time children are already “too old” for the problem to be corrected by the time it is discovered.
Recently, however, I found an interesting article touting the use of neurochemicals to induce a repeat of this critical developmental period. In early childhood, cells within the brain, release the neurotransmitter GABA. There has already been several stages of scientific study, starting with the testing in mice using Valium and Prozac to trigger the developmental stage needed within the visual cortex.
A Harvard Medical School Researcher, Takao Hensch, states that other aliments might also benefit from these discoveries, including, epilepsy, autism and schizophrenia. He says, “These ailments are not neurodegenerative diseases that destroy part of the neural circuity, so if the defective circuits could be stimulated in the right way, the brain could develop normally.”
Hensch’s team describes a protein, called Otx2, which plays a role in embryonic development and becomes active again in early childhood. This protein has the ability to stimulate that same developmental phase in adults and paves the way for a cure for amblyopia.
Neuroscientist Dennis Levi, at the University of California, Berkeley, states, “The future will be some kind of molecular intervention for amblyopia”.
This is great news for the 5% of the population with this visual disorder. I can’t imagine what it would be like to see with both eyes. I’m sure it would require an adjustment period, but I am excited about the prospect of finding a cure for amblyopia. That would mean no more little children wearing “pirate patches” over their “lazy eye”. We might even lose the degrading label of “lazy eye”.
Sources:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=adult-lazy-eye-treatments
http://spectacle.berkeley.edu/opt_txtpp/faculty/fac_profiles/faculty_levi.html
