Acupuncture for the eyes

Acupuncture can help with lazy eye and may be better than eye patching as a treatment for young people.

According to a report in the December 2010 issue of Archives of Ophthalmology, 0.3 to 5 percent of individual have amblyopia or lazy eye. One third to half of the cases are related to different vision deficits in each eye: near sighted for one and far sighted for the other. Glasses can be used to correct the problem in very young children, but for older kids aged 7 to 12 only about a third respond to eyeglass treatment.

Eye patch therapy, or occlusion therapy, increases successful outcome by two thirds, but it's hard to get young people to wear the patch and there can be negative behavorial outcomes as a result of that kind of therapy. Jianhao Zhao, MD, of Joint Shantou International Eye Center of Shantou University and Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shantou, China, and colleagues tested acupuncture in a trial on 88 children. Acupuncture has long been used to treat dry eye and myopia.

43 of the children received acupuncture. The other 45 patched the good eye for two hours a day and instructed to perform eye exercises.

After three months, there was improvement in visual acuity for by 1.8 lines for the eye patch wearers and 2.3 lines in those who had acupuncture. Lazy was resolved in 16.7 percent of patch wearers and 41.5 percent of the acupuncture group. Both treatments were accepted by the children.

"Although the treatment effect of acupuncture appears promising, the mechanism underlying its success as a treatment for amblyopia remains unclear," the authors concluded. They need more to study to find out why it works and to make a recommendation on the specific kinds of acupuncture that work since there are so many variations among practitioners.

Source: JAMA, ScienceDaily