Photo by : Martin Schwalbe
AMBLYOPIA STUDY RECEIVES FUNDING BOOST
The University of Waterloo ’ s professor Ben Thompson has been awarded a $ 100,000 grant to continue his study into how non-invasive brain stimulation can help adults recover from visual disorders like amblyopia , also known as lazy eye .
The faculty member of the School of Optometry and Vision Science will receive the grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research .
Thompson tells Optical Prism that the one-year bridge funding will allow his team , which is working with Sun Yat-sen University , to collect preliminary data , using participants both with and without amblyopia , on the effect of the brain stimulation on a range of visual functions , including visual acuity and crowding . The data collection process was to begin this fall .
“ The results will help guide the design of a subsequent clinical trial ,” he says .
“ I am pleased and encouraged that the Canadian Institutes of Health Research chose to support this project . The funding brings us closer to achieving our goal of providing new treatment options for adults with amblyopia .”
Commonly known as “ lazy eye ,” amblyopia is a loss of vision that originates in the brain and is caused by abnormal visual experience during childhood . If a child develops an eye turn or one eye becomes long sighted , the brain begins to process information from the weaker eye incorrectly . Once amblyopia has developed , even after the issue in the eye is corrected , the vision loss remains until the issue in the brain is fixed .
Treating amblyopia in children typically involves wearing an eye patch over their stronger eye to allow the brain to relearn use of the lazy eye . But , according to the School of Optometry and Vision Science , reprogramming adult brains that have long passed out of the critical development period has proven more difficult . “ With currently no widely accepted treatment options for adults , amblyopia increases a patient ’ s lifetime risk for legal blindness by 50 percent .”
Thompson has discovered that non-invasive transcranial direct current stimulation , a form of low-voltage electrical current , can be effective in temporarily boosting the brain ’ s response to visual stimulation . Their initial findings were published in scientific reports in 2016 .
18 Optical Prism | January 2017