The latest findings from the Australian Blue Mountains Eye Study (BMES) suggest that lazy eye, or amblyopia, does not diminish a person’s employment prospects.

Amblyopia is a condition that usually involves poor vision in one eye for no apparent physical reason. With early diagnosis and treatment, vision can be restored in the affected eye.

The new data also provide more evidence that people with the condition are at increased risk for vision loss in the non-amblyopic eye, and that loss of visual ability in the non-amblyopic eye due to injury or disease can lead to spontaneous improvement in the amblyopic eye.

In BMES, 3654 mostly Caucasian individuals 49 years of age or older underwent detailed eye examinations between 1992 and 1994. Five years later, 2335 were re-examined. Amblyopia was identified in 118 subjects initially, of whom 73 were re-examined 5 years later.

While the presence of amblyopia was not associated with lifetime occupational class, fewer people with amblyopia received a college degree, Dr. Paul Mitchell and Dr. B. Chua from the University of Sydney report in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.

“To our knowledge, no previous reports have addressed the educational and occupational prospects for people with amblyopia,” they note.

The data also show that amblyopic patients have a 5-year risk of visual impairment in the non-amblyopic eye of 33 percent compared with a 13 percent risk in people without the condition.

Of note, 9 percent of amblyopic patients experienced an improvement in visual ability in the amblyopic eye after a vision worsened in the non-amblyopic eye.

Writing in an editorial, Dr. Creig S. Hoyt from the University of California San Francisco points out that “understanding the mechanisms that account for improvement and ‘slippage’ in the (visual ability) of the adult amblyopic eye should be more thoroughly studied. Newer, more effective treatments of amblyopia may be the result of such studies.”

SOURCE: British Journal of Ophthalmology, September 2004.