Source: Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center
Written by: Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center
Edited by: Wang Dongmei

Under a collaboration with Canada’s McGill University and New Zealand’s University of Auckland, Prof Minbin Yu and Dr Jinrong Li (Lecturer) from Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center, a paper regarding their research entitled “Dichoptic training enables the adult amblyopic brain to learn” has been published in the prestigious journal Current Biology, from CELL press on 22 April 2013 (This journal had an average Impact Factor of 10.81 over the past five years focusing to publish significant results in the Field of Life Sciences).

Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center is the first to report these works to the journal, which is accomplished by works of Dr Jinrong Li (First Author) and Prof Minbin Yu (Co-corresponding Author), together with Prof Robert Hess from Canada’s McGill University.

Amblyopia is an ocular disease due to abnormal visual experiences during the critical visual developmental periods. It may cause a severe impairment in both monocular as well as binocular visual functions. While visual cortical inhibition is the key factor in its pathogenesis, there has been a popular notion that visual functions are hard, if at all impossible to recover for patients not treated before the critical visual developmental period of 12 years old. Research in this field has always encompassed many disciplines from Neurosciences, Psychophysics, Vision Sciences to Ophthalmology. Prof Yu’s team at Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center has already collaborated with Prof Hess from McGill University over the past 4 years and has built a common research interest aimed to further understand the mechanism and therapy of visual suppression. Eight SCI papers have already been published within these four years of fruitful collaboration. In their study, they have used a self-designed Tetris-game type training aimed to overcome visual suppression to train amblyopes beyond the critical period of visual development. Rather exciting improvements have been found in not only visual acuity and stereopsis but a significant degree of improvement in visual suppression has been noted as well. The evidence gathered from their experiment helps elucidate the possibility to induce visual plasticity in amblyopes well beyond the critical development period, making it hopeful to find a new treatment mode for adults who have previously failed the conventional treatment. The establishment of this new treatment regimen, binocular vision training, has shed some light into the currently difficult to treat adult amblyopia dilemma. A 15-minute paper presentation will be held at this upcoming ARVO 2013 Conference to be held in Seattle, United States. In the future, Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center will also set up a clinical trial for this new treatment.

www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(13)00094-8