Acupuncture might treat lazy eye, enhance vision--study

Amblyopia is a disorder of the visual system that is characterized by poor or indistinct vision in an eye that is otherwise physically normal. Eye surgery, glasses or contact lenses are normally needed to correct this form of eye visual disorder.

Acupuncture is a procedure adapted from ancient Chinese therapy in which certain body areas are activated by the insertion of sharp, thin needles in order to relieve pain or produce regional anesthesia.

Acupuncture may help lazy eye
This method is already widely used for the pain relief. But what the novel study shows is really amazing, saying that piercing needles into the points on body specifically associated with vision could potentially become an alternative to patching for treating amblyopia in some older children.

"Acupuncture could potentially become an alternative treatment to occlusion [patching] therapy for ambylopia [lazy eye],” WebMD quoted the researchers as writing.

Study details
To find out whether acupuncture could help improve vision in children with lazy eye, Jianhao Zhao, MD, of Joint Shantou International Eye Center of Shantou University and Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shantou, China, and colleagues carried out a single-centered, randomized controlled trial of 88 Chinese children aged 7 to 12 with amblyopia.

The researchers evaluated all the study subjects with the condition known as anisometropic amblyopia, in which there is a difference in the degree of myopia (nearsightedness) or hyperopia (farsightedness) between the two eyes (anisometropia).

They assigned 43 children to the acupuncture group, who received five sessions of acupuncture weekly. Acupuncturists inserted at different points in the head, face, hand, and leg at each session and left in for 15 minutes.

Another 45 children were assigned to receive two hours of patching of the sound eye daily and a typical regimen, and were also asked to do at least one hour per day of near-vision activity like writing or typing.

Study findings
After 15 weeks of follow-up, lazy eye was resolved in 41.5 percent of the children in acupuncture group and in 16.7 percent of those who used the eye patch.

Also visual acuity improved by about 1.8 lines on the vision chart in the patching group and 2.3 lines in those in the acupuncture group.

In addition, an improvement of two lines or more occurred in 66.7 percent or 28 of the children in the patching group but 76 percent or 31 of those in the acupuncture group.

“These results suggest that the treatment effect of acupuncture is equivalent to that of patching for anisometropic amblyopia in older children,” Lam writes, according to WebMD.

But, at 25 weeks the difference disappeared, with 30 percent of the children in patched group and 42.1 percent of acupuncture group experiencing a resolution of their disease.

The authors of the study said they are uncertain how the acupuncture for lazy eye might work, and called for further study of the value of acupuncture in treating amblyopia.

Lam and colleagues reported their study, conducted in China, in the December issue of 'Archives of Ophthalmology.'