Early lazy eye test ‘improves recovery’
Children tested and treated for amblyopia – or lazy eye – at pre-school age, are less likely to be still suffering from the condition at age seven and a half, researchers claim.
The condition affects around 3% of children and is normally simply treated with an eye patch, but if amblyopia is left untreated until the age of seven to eight, the weaker eye will never improve.
Amid much controversy, pre-school screening for amblyopia has been abandoned widely in the UK, with the argument that this delay in treatment is irrelevant, and testing is far more effective at school age.
But Bristol University researchers have reawakened the debate after working with the Children of the 90s project.
They examined the eyesight of 6000 children at the age of seven-and-a-half, a quarter of whom had been offer pre-school screening at the age of three. Only two thirds of those (16.7% of the total) had attended, but all of the children were screened on starting school, as recommended by the NHS.
The team found that by the age of seven-and-a-half, the children who had been tested and treated at three got better results in vision tests. Further, the prevalence of amblyopia was 45% lower in the children who had received the three-year eye test.
However, the practicalities of pre-school testing are still in question, as Dr Cathy Williams points out.
“On a population level, the three-year eye tests made little difference to the total numbers of children with sight problems by the age of seven, because a third of children who were offered the early test did not attend”.
Dr Williams concludes that patching treatment is more effective the earlier it is given, but also that any screening test must be applied to the entire population to make any real difference to eyesight in later childhood.
“Future eye test programmes need to take account of both factors”, she points out.
The research paper is published in the August issue of the British Journal of Ophthalmology.
