Playing video games help improve vision of adults with 'lazy eye'

Scientists have found that playing video games could help improve the vision of adults with ‘lazy eye’.

Adults with amblyopia, or ‘lazy eye’, experienced marked improvement in 3-D depth perception and the sharpness of their vision after spending just 40 hours playing off-the-shelf video games, the researchers said.

Amblyopia is a brain disorder in which vision in one eye does not develop properly. It is the most common cause of permanent visual impairment in childhood, affecting 2 to 3 out of every 100 American children, according to the National Eye Institute.

Amblyopia is also the most common cause of one-eye visual impairment among young and middle-age adults.

Although amblyopia can be successfully treated in children by putting a patch over the “good eye” to force the brain to use the weaker “lazy eye,” few options are available for adults with this condition.

“These new findings are very encouraging because there are currently no accepted treatments for adults with amblyopia,” Live science quoted researcher Dennis Levi at the University of California, Berkeley, as saying.

The findings have been detailed online Aug. 30 in the journal PLoS Biology.