Acupuncture Can Treat Some Types Of Amblyopia

Acupuncture Can Treat Some Types Of Amblyopia.
Acupuncture may be an effectual movement to treat older children struggling with a certain form of lazy eye, revitalized research from China suggests, although experts say more studies are needed. Lazy eye (amblyopia) is essentially a assert 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 examine authors noted that anywhere from less than 1 percent to 5 percent of hoi polloi worldwide are affected with the condition andractim. Of those, between one third and one half have a model of lazy eye known as anisometropia, which is caused by a difference in the degree of nearsightedness or farsightedness between the two eyes.

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

Children, however, often have trouble adhering to responsibility therapy, the treatment can bring emotional issues for some and a reverse form of lazy eye can also nab root, the researchers said. Study author Dr Dennis SC Lam, from the unit 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 blast their observations in the December event of the Archives of Ophthalmology.

In the search for a better option than patch therapy, Lam and his associates set out to probe 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 indicated acupuncture needle insertion points (located at the first-rate of the rule and the eyebrow region, as well as the legs and hands). The other half were given two hours a era of snip therapy, combined with a minimum of one hour per day of near-vision exercises such as reading.

After about four months of treatment, the dig into team found that overall visual acuity improved markedly more among the acupuncture number 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 physique 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 methodology that may lend itself to different success rates, depending on the skills of the particular acupuncturist. And while theorizing that the conspicuous success of this alternative approach may have something to do with stimulating blood flow, retinal sand growth and visual cortex activity, the authors acknowledged that the exact mechanism by which it works remains unsatisfactorily understood.

Dr Richard Bensinger, a Seattle-based ophthalmologist and spokesman for the American Academy of Ophthalmology, said that the judgement is "certainly suggestive and worth following up. This is kind of cool," he said. "But I will turn 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 suppose there's fair 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 circuit people in those parts of the country, like where I live, where there's fairly wide acceptance of variant medicine might receive this type of treatment better than others," Bensinger cautioned. "And no proposition 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 turned on - 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 sphere of influence at Columbia University in New York City, did not seem to hold out much likelihood for acupuncture's potential as an alternative lazy eye therapy. "Acupuncture I think indubitably 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 healing of myopia and glaucoma, without much success.

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