Washington: Amblyopia - more commonly known as "lazy eye" - may cause the brain to alter its wiring, according to a new study.
As the brain develops its preference for the dominant eye's input, it alters its connections to the weaker eye, researchers have found.
That makes amblyopia - more commonly known as "lazy eye" - all the more obvious, but the physical manifestation of the most common cause of vision problems among children the world over is actually a brain disorder, researchers said.
"Most often in amblyopia patients, one eye is better at focusing," said Bas Rokers, a University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology professor.
"The brain prefers the information from that eye, and pushes down the signal coming from the other, 'lazy' eye. In a way, it's better to think of the better eye as a bully, rather than the poorer eye as lazy," Rokers said.
As the brain develops its preference for the dominant eye's input, it alters its connections to the weaker eye, according to the study published in the journal Vision Research.
"If you continually have that bullying happening, that changes the signals coming from the lazy eye," Rokers said.
"We wondered, if you don't have as many signals travelling back and forth, does that come with a physical change in those passageways?" Rokers said.
Using a brain scanning method called diffusion-weighted imaging, the researchers mapped three sets of pathways known to carry visual information from the eyes to the brain.
In people with amblyopia, the researchers saw water diffusing more easily down the brain's visual pathways.
"What we think may be happening in amblyopia is that the conductive sheath around neurons becomes thinner," Rokers said.
"In order to conduct information from one location to another, neurons have a sheath of material called myelin around them to insulate and speed up processing. When the myelin is thinner, there is less of it in the way and the water diffuses more easily," Rokers said.
This understanding of the structural effects of amblyopia may improve treatments for amblyopia and similar vision disorders in which sufferers have trouble judging distance and location of objects in parts of their visual field.
The most common medical response to lazy eye is to correct the cause - most often muscular misalignment of the eyes, but sometimes a misshapen lens - through surgery, and put a patch over the amblyope's strong eye to force the brain to adapt to using the formerly lazy one.
But that treatment is usually limited to children.
"You don't see any adults walking around with patched eyes, because adults' brains are less plastic, less trainable, and we think the patch approach doesn't have any effect late in life," said Rokers.
"But that belief is changing, and this diffusion-weighted imaging approach will help us understand whether, and how much, brain training treatments work," Rokers said.
