Medical care for your child involves routine screening for various conditions. Very few parents, however, appreciate the need for regular visits to a vision clinic. Vision problems in children are prevalent and might progress quickly to cause eventual blindness.
One of the prevailing conditions in children that will benefit from early detection and treatment is amblyopia. This condition affects about 10% of pediatric patients seen at an eye clinic in Maple Grove, MN, in varying degrees. Here are the three primary classifications of amblyopia.
Strabismic Amblyopia
This is the most prevalent form of amblyopia. It develops when your child’s eyes aims at different directions. To prevent double vision, the image created by the misaligned eye is not processed by the brain.
Your child hence only uses their dominant eye for vision. There are two classifications of strabismic amblyopia including constant and intermittent. Constant strabismic amblyopia is the more severe one.
Refractive Amblyopia
Unequal refraction in your child’s eyes causes this. One of the eyes might be more astigmatic or near or farsighted compared to the other. The brain will not process the image generated by the less focused eye. Refractive amblyopia is the hardest type to detect since the eyes in most cases look normal.
Deprivation Amblyopia
This stems from obstruction and lack of focusing of the light entering your child’s eyes. Congenital cataracts typically cause the obstacle, but ptosis, eyelid tumors, and irregularly shaped corneas can also contribute to obstruction.
Deprivation amblyopia is the most severe type of the condition. Its effective management involves removal of the obstruction.
All the above forms of amblyopia are hard to detect for parents making the need for routine vision checkups extremely vital. With early detection, the condition can be corrected with contact lenses and eyeglasses.
The ‘good’ eye might need to be patched to reinforce the brain’s attention to the images from the amblyopic eye efficiently restoring normal vision.