It’s not too late to fix that lazy eye

In 1968 the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare published a booklet of “Peanuts” cartoons to teach people about lazy eye.

In it, an ophthalmologist confirms that Sally has a lazy eye and needs to wear an eye patch. Sally has trouble adjusting to the patch and is teased at school, but as her time wearing it comes to an end, she proclaims: “My ophthalmologist and I regard this as a major triumph ... with nothing more than a simple eye patch, we have brought amblyopia to its knees!”

For decades eye doctors have seen “lazy eye” as a childhood problem that had to be fixed when you were quite young. They thought the part of the brain responsible for processing visual information, the visual cortex, stopped developing around age 5 or 6, so visual improvements couldn’t be made after that.

But a new study published in Journal of Neuroscience suggests that it might be possible to treat lazy eye into middle age.

Scientists looked at the brain tissue of people ages 20 to 80 and found that the visual cortex doesn’t stop maturing until around age 36 (plus or minus about 4.5 years)!

This is exciting news for anyone with a developmental vision problem. If you have amblyopia, in which one eye focuses better than the other, or even a condition like strabismus, the misalignment of the eyes, it might not be too late to correct your vision problems. Talk to your ophthalmologist about possible treatment options.