Journal of American Association for Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus
Major ArticleDichoptic movie viewing treats childhood amblyopia
Section snippets
Materials and Methods
This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and conformed to all local laws and complied with regulations of the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. Written informed consent was obtained from all parents/guardians.
Eight amblyopic children (4-10 years) were referred by 2 pediatric ophthalmologists. To be eligible, children had to have a best-corrected visual acuity, expressed as the logarithm of the
Results
All 8 referred amblyopic children (6 females [75%]) were enrolled. Baseline characteristics are summarized in Table 1. The cohort included 3 children (38%) with anisometropic amblyopia, 1 (13%) with strabismic amblyopia, and 4 (50%) with combined mechanism amblyopia. Amblyopic eye visual acuity ranged from 0.50 to 1.20 logMAR at baseline, and all had nil stereoacuity. None of the children in the study had manifest tropia following treatment with glasses and/or surgery. Prior to baseline, all
Discussion
The preliminary results of this proof-of-concept study demonstrate that passive viewing of dichoptic feature films is feasible and indicate the potential for a new treatment for childhood amblyopia. Although a separate control group was not incorporated in this pilot study, our retrospective data showed that regular TV/movie viewing (either monocular or binocular) for months prior to our study did not result in improved best-corrected visual acuity in the amblyopic eye. However, controlled
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Conflict of interest: McGill University holds two patents for this dichoptic movie treatment. Drs. Reynaud and Hess are the named inventors. Other authors have no commercial relationships to disclose.