Acupuncture Can Treat Some Types Of Amblyopia

Acupuncture Can Treat Some Types Of Amblyopia.
Acupuncture may be an operative situation to treat older children struggling with a certain form of lazy eye, experimental research from China suggests, although experts say more studies are needed. Lazy eye (amblyopia) is essentially a pomp of miscommunication between the brain and the eyes, resulting in the favoring of one eye over the other, according to the National Eye Institute. The haunt authors noted that anywhere from less than 1 percent to 5 percent of colonize worldwide are affected with the condition. Of those, between one third and one half have a typeface of lazy eye known as anisometropia, which is caused by a difference in the degree of nearsightedness or farsightedness between the two eyes.

Standard remedying for children involves eyeglasses or contact lens designed to correct heart issues. However, while this approach is often successful in younger children (between the ages of 3 and 7), it is top among only about a third of older children (between the ages of 7 and 12). For the latter group, doctors will often room a patch over the "good" eye temporarily in addition to eyeglasses, and curing success is typically achieved in two-thirds of cases.

Children, however, often have trouble adhering to plat therapy, the treatment can bring emotional issues for some and a reverse form of lazy eye can also hold root, the researchers said. Study author Dr Dennis SC Lam, from the sphere of influence of ophthalmology and visual sciences and Institute of Chinese Medicine at the Joint Shantou International Eye Center of Shantou University and Chinese University of Hong Kong, and his colleagues gunshot their observations in the December emanate of the Archives of Ophthalmology.

In the search for a better option than patch therapy, Lam and his associates set out to search the potential benefits of acupuncture, noting that it has been used to treat dry eye and myopia. Between 2007 and 2009, Lam and his colleagues recruited 88 children between the ages of 7 and 12 who had been diagnosed with anisometropia.

About half the children were treated five times a week with acupuncture, targeting five unambiguous acupuncture needle insertion points (located at the surpass of the intelligence and the eyebrow region, as well as the legs and hands). The other half were given two hours a daylight of field therapy, combined with a minimum of one hour per day of near-vision exercises such as reading.

After about four months of treatment, the digging team found that overall visual acuity improved markedly more among the acupuncture body relative to the patch group. In fact, they noted that while lazy eye was successfully treated in nearly 42 percent of the acupuncture patients, that silhouette dropped to less than 17 percent in the midst the patch patients.