Your sense of sight is a product of a collaboration between your brain and your eyes. You may develop amblyopia when one of your eyes is unable to coordinate properly with your brain. This may render you unable to achieve normal eye sharpness even if you use prescription contact lenses or eyeglasses.
Insight Vision Center Optometry, your trusted provider of scleral lenses and other eye care services, talks about this condition in detail.
Types and Their Corresponding Causes
Also known as “lazy eye”, this vision error has three general classifications based on their underlying cause. The refractive kind happens when your eyes have unequal refractive errors. This causes your brain to pay more attention to the stronger eye while the other eye slowly deteriorates from lack of use. The strabismic type, on the other hand, develops when the brain fails to recognize visual signals from the misaligned eye. Lastly, deprivation amblyopia occurs when something obstructs the light rays from entering your eyes, causing a delay in your visual development process.
Signs and Symptoms
Some common signs are frequent wandering or crossing of your eyes. You may also tend to squint or close one of your eyes to compensate for the sight difficulties. Head tilting, frequent headaches or even poor overall vision may indicate lazy eyes, too. Visit your eye specialist immediately when you notice any of these. We’ll perform an eye exam and evaluate if vision therapy can help improve your eyesight.
Our Suggested Management
Amblyopia can be detected through a comprehensive eye exam. First, we’ll measure how sharp your eyes are. We’ll also evaluate your different eye muscles. We may ask you to perform some eye exercises to assess how well your eyes and brain work together as well.
Upon confirming amblyopia, we may recommend wearing an eye patch on the stronger eye to train your brain to use the lazy eye. Another variation of this principle is applying atropine eye drops to the stronger eye. Doing so blurs the strong eye’s vision, leaving your brain no choice but to acknowledge signals from the affected eye. We may also include vision therapy eye exercises in your treatment plan to improve the coordination between your visual and nervous systems.
For more information about amblyopia, call us at (714) 988-6179, or complete our form. We serve Costa Mesa, Newport Beach and nearby California communities.