Acupuncture Can Treat Some Types Of Amblyopia

Acupuncture Can Treat Some Types Of Amblyopia.
Acupuncture may be an noticeable scheme to treat older children struggling with a certain form of lazy eye, late research from China suggests, although experts say more studies are needed. Lazy eye (amblyopia) is essentially a status of miscommunication between the brain and the eyes, resulting in the favoring of one eye over the other, according to the National Eye Institute. The turn over authors noted that anywhere from less than 1 percent to 5 percent of mobile vulgus worldwide are affected with the condition. Of those, between one third and one half have a personification of lazy eye known as anisometropia, which is caused by a difference in the degree of nearsightedness or farsightedness between the two eyes.

Standard curing for children involves eyeglasses or contact lens designed to correct heart issues. However, while this approach is often successful in younger children (between the ages of 3 and 7), it is triumphant among only about a third of older children (between the ages of 7 and 12). For the latter group, doctors will often chore a patch over the "good" eye temporarily in addition to eyeglasses, and healing success is typically achieved in two-thirds of cases.

Children, however, often have trouble adhering to area therapy, the treatment can bring emotional issues for some and a reverse form of lazy eye can also accompany root, the researchers said. Study author Dr Dennis SC Lam, from the segment of ophthalmology and visual sciences and Institute of Chinese Medicine at the Joint Shantou International Eye Center of Shantou University and Chinese University of Hong Kong, and his colleagues clock in their observations in the December dissemination of the Archives of Ophthalmology.

In the search for a better option than patch therapy, Lam and his associates set out to research the potential benefits of acupuncture, noting that it has been used to treat dry eye and myopia. Between 2007 and 2009, Lam and his colleagues recruited 88 children between the ages of 7 and 12 who had been diagnosed with anisometropia.

About half the children were treated five times a week with acupuncture, targeting five unambiguous acupuncture needle insertion points (located at the prune of the leader and the eyebrow region, as well as the legs and hands). The other half were given two hours a age of plat therapy, combined with a minimum of one hour per day of near-vision exercises such as reading.

After about four months of treatment, the examine team found that overall visual acuity improved markedly more among the acupuncture crowd relative to the patch group. In fact, they noted that while lazy eye was successfully treated in nearly 42 percent of the acupuncture patients, that form dropped to less than 17 percent in the midst the patch patients.

Neither treatment prompted significant side effects, the authors said. The troupe nonetheless pointed out that their study's tracking period was relatively short, and that acupuncture is a complicated technique that may lend itself to different success rates, depending on the skills of the particular acupuncturist. And while theorizing that the seeming success of this alternative approach may have something to do with stimulating blood flow, retinal steadfastness growth and visual cortex activity, the authors acknowledged that the exact mechanism by which it works remains inadequately understood.

Dr Richard Bensinger, a Seattle-based ophthalmologist and spokesman for the American Academy of Ophthalmology, said that the discovery is "certainly suggestive and worth following up. This is kind of cool," he said. "But I will give the word that I don't know of any study looking at acupuncture and vision. There are studies based on symptomatic things such as pain, and I consider there's easy on the eye good evidence that it does have benefit in that respect. But for vision therapy this is the first I've heard of it, and I don't recognize that anyone has ever tried this before.

So this is like a teaser. Of tack people in those parts of the country, like where I live, where there's fairly wide acceptance of selection medicine might receive this type of treatment better than others," Bensinger cautioned. "And no issue patients will gravitate towards treatments that are covered by their insurance even if it's not the best treatment.

And as an alternative approach, this may not be covered. But if it works," he added, "people will certainly be wrought up - although it certainly needs further testing and further studies to settle if it's really beneficial or not".

For his part, Dr Stanley Chang, chairman of the ophthalmology bailiwick at Columbia University in New York City, did not seem to hold out much appear likely for acupuncture's potential as an alternative lazy eye therapy. "Acupuncture I think categorically works for pain amelioration, but I'm not sure it works for some of these other things," he cautioned. "They've tried it for the care of myopia and glaucoma, without much success.

And so although there haven't been any really good trials comparing acupuncture with old hat therapies, my guess is that it's probably not going to do much for the treatment of lazy eye". "However, I assume it's worth considering or trying," Chang added, "because nothing else seems to stir very well for patients of that age, including patch therapy bestvito. But what will need is a very carefully controlled lessons that accounts for all the variables that might have an impact on the outcome of this approach".