[10] Many people with amblyopia, especially those who only have a mild form, are not aware they have the condition until tested at older ages, since the vision in their stronger eye is normal.
[15] Perception of depth, from monocular cues such as size, perspective, and motion parallax remains normal.
Children's brains are more neuroplastic, so can more easily adapt by suppressing images from one of the eyes, eliminating the double vision.
[citation needed] Recent evidence points to a cause of infantile strabismus lying with the input to the visual cortex.
[18] Those with strabismic amblyopia tend to show ocular motion deficits when reading, even when they use the nonamblyopic eye.
Penalization usually consists of applying atropine drops to temporarily paralyze the accommodation reflex, leading to the blurring of vision in the good eye.
This helps to prevent the bullying and teasing associated with wearing a patch, although sometimes application of the eye drops is challenging.
The ocular alignment itself may be treated with surgical or nonsurgical methods, depending on the type and severity of the strabismus.
The image in the other eye is blurred, which results in abnormal development of one half of the visual system.
Also pediatric refractive surgery is a treatment option, in particular if conventional approaches have failed due to aniseikonia or lack of compliance or both.
[26] These opacities prevent adequate visual input from reaching the eye, and disrupt development.
[28] The part of the brain receiving images from the affected eye is not stimulated properly and does not develop to its full visual potential.
David H. Hubel and Torsten Wiesel won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1981 for their work in showing the extent of the damage to ocular dominance columns produced in kittens by sufficient visual deprivation during the so-called "critical period".
It can be defined as an interocular difference of two lines or more in acuity (e.g. on Snellen chart) when the eye optics are maximally corrected.
[31] Binocular retinal birefringence scanning may be able to identify, already in very young children, amblyopia that is associated with strabismus, microstrabismus, or reduced fixation accuracy.
[38] One of the German public health insurance providers, Barmer, has changed its policy to cover, as of 1 April 2014, the cost of software for amblyopic children whose condition did not improve through patching.
[39] Treatment for amblyopia depends on the child’s age, severity of the vision loss and the prescribing doctor’s preference.
[50] A 2009 study,[51] widely reported in the popular press,[52] suggested that repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation may temporarily improve contrast sensitivity and spatial resolution in the affected eye of adults with amblyopia.
[56] A 2013 study concluded that converging evidence indicates decorrelated binocular experience plays a pivotal role in the genesis of amblyopia and the associated residual deficits.
[59] Furthermore, the effects of this kind of therapy may be further enhanced by noninvasive brain stimulation[54] as shown by a recent study using anodal tDCS.