Causes of Lazy Eye
What causes people to have lazy eyes? I feel as though they aren’t as common today. Either that, or it is easier to fix now. Is it easily inherited from parent to child, or is it more of a rare occurrence.
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Answers ( 1 )
Lazy eye appears as a muscle imbalance in the eye, but ultimately it's brain-eye coordination issue, where the brain suppresses information the eye is sending that may be confusing in the brain. And to put it simply, the eye wanders off. It's the brain trying to cope with confusing information, that may be a visual disturbance with the eye not functioning quite as expected.
It can be remedied by strengthening the weak eye through wearing an eye patch on the good eye for a few hours each day, and may also be treated with prescription eyeglasses worn for the same few hours a day. There are also some other options that include adding eyedrops to the strong eye causing it to see blurry, and that forces the weaker eye to work harder to see correctly - that eliminates the need for wearing a patch. But ultimately it requires a form of physical therapy to train the eye and brain to work better together with some visual exercises.
My mother had a lazy eye, and especially when she grew tired, the eye would start to wander to the right. There wasn't much for treatment when she was a child growing up in the 30s and 40s, but there's better options now, and it is often diagnosed sooner.