Patching after unilateral cataract: Less may be more
Gradual reductions in the amount of patching from 3 to 4 hours at 1 year of age showed significantly better outcomes in children who undergo unilateral congenital cataract surgery.
Reviewed by Scott R. Lambert, MD
The amount of patching is an important predictive factor of visual outcomes and stereopsis in children who undergo unilateral cataract surgery. Gradual reductions in patching from 3 to 4 hours at 1 year of age showed significantly better outcomes in these patients.
There is no gold standard regarding the amount of patching of the “good eye” in children who underwent removal of a cataractous lens, according to Scott R. Lambert, MD.
“There is a great deal of evidence regarding the amount of patching to use in children with strabismus and esotropic amblyopia from various studies,” said Dr. Lambert, national chairman of the Infant Aphakia Treatment Study (IATS) and professor of ophthalmology, Stanford University Medical Center, Palo Alto, CA. “However, no good studies have provided data on patching children with visual deprivation amblyopia.”
This absence of guidance for this subpopulation of children prompted Dr. Lambert and colleagues to perform an analysis of data from the IATS (JAMA Ophthalmol. 2014;132:676-682), a multicenter clinical trial sponsored by the National Eye Institute that compared visual outcomes after unilateral cataract surgery in children with and without an IOL.
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