| Sumario: | Amblyopia, which has been discussed and treated as early as the 18th century, is a visual problem in which the brain fails to process input signals equally between the eyes, causing the patient to favor one eye. The causes can be refractive, strabismic, or via deprivation of visual stimulation. Amblyopia is a diagnosis of exclusion; thus, ocular pathology must be ruled out. Clinically, it is defined as a decreased best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) in one or both eyes. Organizations such as the Pediatric Eye Disease Investigator Group (PEDIG) have produced much groundwork when discussing the standard of care for treating amblyopic patients. Numerous studies have shown that treatment efficacy decreases significantly after a certain age, and about a quarter of all patients successfully treated will regress. Over the last two decades, a variety of treatment protocols have been tested, including spectacle correction, part-time occlusion, full-time occlusion, and pharmaceuticals such as atropine. The mainstay of amblyopic management is penalizing the better-seeing eye, leading to better vision development in the amblyopic eye. Amblyopia, however, is a binocular problem, and recent studies have tried to address this concern. Those studies, as mentioned above, had problems with both patient numbers and compliance with study protocols. These issues could be casting a shadow of doubt on the possibility of a more efficacious treatment that also helps with lingering binocular vision issues. Currently, no studies performed have shown greater efficacy when treating amblyopia long-term than sequential patching after optimal correction.
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