Dr Sarah Dean
Dr Sarah Dean, Senior Lecturer in Psychology and a member of Staffordshire University’s Centre for Health Psychology, summarises the findings from her recent review of research on patching treatment for children with amblyopia which has recently been published by the British Journal of Ophthalmology:
Amblyopia or ‘lazy eye’ is a condition that affects a lot of children. Children with amblyopia have poor vision in one eye and without treatment this vision does not develop, meaning they have an increased risk of blindness. Treatment for amblyopia often involves the child being prescribed to wear a patch over their ‘good’ eye for part of the day. This forces the child to use their ‘lazy eye’ which allows the vision to develop. Although this treatment has been found to work really well when used with children under 7 years old, a lot of people find it difficult to adhere to their prescribed treatment. I am exploring strategies to encourage children to complete the treatment.
Getting young children to wear eye-patches can be quite difficult!
In our recent paper, myself and my colleagues, Dr Rachel Povey and Jessica Reeves, investigated how effective existing interventions which aimed to increase compliance to patching treatment in children with amblyopia were. We reviewed nine studies in our final sample, with interventions ranging from sticking the patch more tightly to the child’s face, changing aspects of the patching regime, to providing information for the child, family and friends. Our findings indicated that interventions that include an educational element may be most effective in encouraging children to keep wearing their eye-patches to treat amblyopia.
Dr Sarah Dean plans to continue working in this area. In her next study she plans to talk to young children who are undergoing patching treatment to find out more about their experiences of patching. Information from this next study will then help her to develop a new intervention to help children complete their patching treatment.
Read more about Sarah’s review via the British Journal of Ophthalmology’s website:
Dean, S.E., Povey, R. P., & Reeves, J. (in press). Assessing interventions to increase compliance to patching treatment in children with amblyopia: a systematic review and meta-analysis. British Journal of Ophthalmology. doi:10.1136/bjophthalmol-2015-307340
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