Can Short-Term Ocular Dominance Plasticity Provide a General Index to Visual Plasticity to Personalize Treatment in Amblyopia?

Recently, Lunghi et al. (2016) showed that amblyopic eye's visual acuity Seven children (6.86 ± 1.46 years old; SD) with anisometropic amblyopia participated in this study. All patients were newly diagnosed and had no treatment history before participating in our study. They finished 2 months of refractive adaptation and then received a 4-h daily fellow eye patching therapy with an opaque patch for a 2-month period. Best-corrected visual acuity of the amblyopic eye was measured before and after the patching therapy. The homeostatic plasticity was assessed by measuring the temporary shift of perceptual eye dominance from 2-h occlusion of the amblyopic eye before treatment. A binocular phase combination paradigm was used for this study. We found that there was no significant correlation between the temporary shift of perceptual eye dominance observed after 2-h occlusion of the amblyopic eye and the improvement in visual acuity in the amblyopic eye from 2 months of classical patching therapy. This result, although in disagreements with the conclusions of Lunghi et al. involving the short-term patching of the amblyopic eye, is in fact consistent with a reanalysis of Lunghi and colleagues' data. The short-term changes in perceptual eye dominance as a result of short-term monocular deprivation do not provide an index of cortical plasticity in the general sense such that they are able to predict acuity outcomes from longer-term classical patching.

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