Amblyopia is a common disorder with a prevalence of about 2% to 4% at home and abroad. Early detection and treatment is a curable disease. Amblyopia not only affects monocular or binocular vision, but also causes damage to various aspects of visual function, such as the loss of binocular monocularity, precise and advanced stereo vision, which can seriously affect work, study and quality of life. What is amblyopia? Amblyopia is a condition in which no lesion is found in the eye and the vision of one eye or both eyes is reduced and cannot be corrected with glasses. The visual acuity standard is set at ≤0.8 or less, but age and developmental reasons should be taken into account, and the difference in visual acuity between the two eyes should be taken into account. If the right eye is 1.0 and the left eye is 0.7 or the right eye is 0.8 and the left eye is 0.6, this should be noted and actively treated. Children measure visual acuity, which is expressed automatically after about 3 years of age, and may be affected by multiple factors that do not reach normal visual acuity, such as mental distraction and poor visual physiological development. Most children have visual acuity between 0.7 and 1.0. Children who do not have normal visual acuity should not wait and see because of developmental deficits, but should be monitored for the presence of amblyopia by a specialist using certain means. What is the difference between myopia and amblyopia? Clinically, many patients’ family members mistake myopia for amblyopia, but it is not the same thing. Myopic patients can achieve normal vision through refractive correction, while amblyopic patients cannot immediately correct to normal vision even through correction. Clinical experience shows that if myopia exists and cannot be corrected, it is often combined with organic eye diseases, such as optic nerve atrophy, macular degeneration, retinal disorders, etc., which should cause a high degree of vigilance. Do not confuse myopia with amblyopia. Clinical characteristics of amblyopia After suffering from amblyopia, the first thing that will happen is poor visual acuity, corrected visual acuity is lower than normal, mild between 0.8-0.6, moderate between 0.5-0.2, and severe below 0.2. The visual acuity will be correspondingly better when examining individual visual acuity and worse when examining rows of visual acuity charts, which is a physiological peculiarity of children’s visual acuity. Children with low vision can show blurred vision, visual headache, squinting, false eyes, skewed head and side vision, etc. However, there are quite a few children with no obvious symptoms, especially amblyopia with good monocular vision, which does not show any symptoms at all. There are different types of amblyopia, such as strabismus, refractive error, refractive error and blocked vision (i.e. masking). Strabismic amblyopia is a common type of amblyopia in clinical practice. Because one eye is often strabismic, the patient often uses one eye, and the function of the strabismic eye is suppressed to produce low visual function. Refractive parallax amblyopia is a type of amblyopia in which one eye has a relatively good function, but the other eye has a refractive difference of more than 2D, resulting in a lower visual function than the healthy eye and preventing the normal use of the eye, and in which amblyopia is caused by low visual acuity and the inability to synchronize both eyes, such as hyperopia and astigmatism in one eye. It should be noted that hyperopia does not mean that you can see far away, but that the image of the object falls behind the retina. Patients with hyperopia not only do not see far, but also do not see far or near clearly, which is easily inhibited by the visual center of the brain and causes amblyopia. Refractive strabismus refers to the co-existence of hyperopia or astigmatism in both eyes, and the retina of both eyes is not clearly imaged, so the signal to the brain is also a blurred impression, even after the correction of the refractive abnormalities, the visual function cannot be corrected immediately, and the brain center has to have a process to identify these visual signals and gradually get rid of the amblyopia. V. How to prevent and detect amblyopia at an early stage Early detection of eye abnormalities in younger children is extremely important. Infants and children are very susceptible to lifelong central vision loss due to refractive interstitial clouding, cataracts, uncorrected refractive strabismus and other conditions that affect the quality of visual imaging. The visual pathway is still developing from birth to approximately 10 years of age, and treatment is more effective during this time. Visual impairment due to early childhood amblyopia can cause lifelong vision loss if left untreated or inadequately treated, and although visual acuity improvement has been reported in older age or adult cases, most patients with amblyopia do not experience significant changes in visual acuity when treated after the visual system has matured. Therefore early identification of the different factors of amblyopia in children is very important to improve the outcome of treatment. If parents find symptoms such as false eye, head tilting, squinting, side vision, and looking close to things in their children’s visual habits, they should take the initiative to find a specialist for examination to rule out ocular factors of poor vision. In addition, we advocate active checkups for infants and young children, from the external eye, refractive interstitial, fundus, eye position and other detailed examinations, so as not to let go of every factor that affects vision. At present, many kindergartens and schools have already done regular physical examinations and screening of visual acuity as a routine preventive health work, which undoubtedly greatly improves the detection rate of amblyopia. However, this work is not balanced throughout society, and there are still a large number of amblyopia patients who are undetected and not treated in time, and regret for life. If our society were to conduct regular medical examinations from birth to childhood, as some developed countries do, amblyopia would be detected early. If our parents were to take care of their children’s visual condition and receive timely specialist care, amblyopia could be corrected in time. At that time, we will exchange the child’s visual health with a small cost. VI. Treatment of amblyopia The biggest problem of amblyopia treatment is to identify the different factors that cause amblyopia. If a child is found to have a vision-blocking disease such as cataract, keratoconus, ptosis, etc. these vision-blocking factors should be removed promptly. Of course eye diseases should be treated as soon as they are detected. If the refractive state is abnormal, the pupil should be dilated in time for examination and appropriate glasses should be worn in time. If the vision of both eyes is unbalanced after wearing glasses, with one eye better and one eye worse, the masking method can be chosen. The method is to cover the eye with better vision and force the eye with poor vision to see things. For poor vision in both eyes, the visual stimulation method of doing fine activities can be chosen. Strabismic amblyopia not only requires corrective training for amblyopia, including methods such as masking and visual stimulation, but also considers surgical correction of eye position depending on whether wearing glasses can completely correct strabismus. Auxiliary amblyopia treatment methods suffer from many, and different treatments should be chosen depending on the situation. Again, it is important to emphasize that amblyopia treatment is most effective before the age of 10 – 12 years old, and beyond that, the treatment process will be difficult and more costly. It is likely that the state of amblyopia in children is irreversible for life, which is a major concern for parents of children.