Lazy eye, or amblyopia, is typically treated with eye patches or special eye drops that block vision in the good eye so that the weaker one is forced to develop better. This normally involves young children who all too often hate eye drops and refuse to wear patches over the very eye that they see well through.
The Amblyz glasses from XPAND, a company better known for 3D movie glasses, offer visual occlusion without the anxiety of eye drops or the embarrassment of patches. At the American Academy of Ophthalmology’s annual meeting in Las Vegas this week, results of a study using the programmable glasses have been presented, and they’re quite positive. The Amblyz eyewear can be programmed to occlude either eye on a predefined schedule, while the lenses themselves are made to fit the vision prescription of the individual child. This provides both vision correction and occlusion in an attractive package that kids should be a lot more compliant with.
The study conducted by the Glick Eye Institute at Indiana University involved kids with lazy eye who wore traditional patches for two hours a day and another group that wore the Amblyz glasses for four hours daily. The glasses were programmed to switch between clear and opaque every thirty seconds. The study took three months to complete and the results showed that both groups had similar improvement in their vision (about two lines on a reading chart).
While compliance wasn’t the focus of the research, Daniel Neely, M.D., a pediatric ophthalmology professor at Indiana University who led the study, noted that because the glasses clear up soon after going dark the kids aren’t so worried that they have to only use their bad eye for long periods of time.
Product page: Amblyz Glasses…
