Optical Prism March 2016 | Page 21

and can often increase the Percentage of Time Strabismic (POTS) among those with eye turns. In cases of strabismus and amblyopia, specialty prescribing is often the best first step, and should be given great attention,” he said. He noted the use of aniseikonic/ isophoric lens designs, now made relatively simple through ShawLens. com, can be an easy first step in addressing the causes. With this type of lens, the images are equalized at the retinal level. Sensory fusion can now occur. The patient can integrate the two images more easily. We’ve found through clinical research that the time was taken to correct the amblyopia is significantly reduced and, best of all, vision suppression using a patch or drops may not be necessary. “Amblyopia, commonly referred to as lazy eye, is weakness of vision in an otherwise healthy eye. It is frequently associated with a blurred image from an uncorrected refractive error in one eye or mis-alignment of the images due to strabismus,” said Peter J Shaw OD, CEO Shaw Lens and Adjunct Associate Research Professor, University of Waterloo. He said in either case the result is that the visual cortex of the brain is unable to fuse the images together as one. In order to deal with the image difference and resultant disruption the brain actively inhibits and ignores the less viable image from one eye and over time this behavior, if left untreated, permanently impairs the resultant vision. Research has shown that this inhibition actually occurs in the brain and not the eye, so really, perhaps it should be called lazy brain. “The most frequent causes of amblyopia is blurred vision due to anisometropia or anisometropic astigmatism,” he said. “These are common vision conditions that even when corrected with eyeglasses fail to fully remediate the problem. This can create an obstacle to fusion in visual cortex in the form of aniseikonia (unequally sized ocular images due to spectacle image magnification inequality).” He said in order to increase the success in the treatment of amblyopia many optometrist specializing in developmental vision employ the use of iseikonic corrective therapies including contact lenses, refractive procedures and iseikonic eyeglass lenses. Iseikonic therapies including iseikonic eyeglass lenses ensure that the images in the brain are equally sized and provide the necessary foundation to fully remediate the amblyopic vision. “When all barriers to eye teaming are eliminated, the vision system can function as nature intended. The results from iseikonic therapies can be dramatic with improvement in vision from mild to moderate straight eye, refractive amblyopia seeming to occur instantly,” he said. “Sometimes vision therapy is required to achieve the fullest vision potential, new techniques in therapy often include 3D games and eye-hand coordination tasks,” he said adding experts in vision agree that patching is no longer considered a primary therapy for amblyopia. “Teaching the eyes to work together provides a lasting and less invasive approach to successfully treating amblyopia. Iseikonic lenses such as Shaw Lens provide the foundation to enable eye teaming,” he said. Optical Prism | March 2016 19