Teen age visual acuity in treated amblyopic elderly children.

The author shows the four years follow-up results in amblyopic elderly subjects who had undergone occlusion therapy at an age almost considered poor responsive to patching regimen. The charts of 56 refractive amblyopic children who had successful occlusion therapy at a mean age of 8.6 years and had gained a mean final visual acuity of 0.95, where retrospectively reviewed to valuate the effectiveness and duration of functional results obtained. All the patients were examined for four years every six months till an age of 12 to 14 years (mean final age 12.7). The mean final visual acuity tested with Albini E ottotype was 0.96 with glasses, instead the mean final visual acuity tested with Snellen charts was 0.90 showing a slight relapse of final visual acuity during years. 12 patients (30%) had contact lenses and the visual acuity was 1.0 in all the subjects, confirming the great advantage of this optical correction in refractive anisometropia. These results confirm the importance of treating all the amblyopic patients even if considered in someway non responsive to treatment, as reported in a previous work presented at 25(th) ESA Meeting. To understand the real functional amelioration of patching regimen the author stress now the importance of adopting in treated amblyopic children a classification based on the visual results or on attainment of a predefined functional target: reading telephone directories without problems.