This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Reply to article  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related letter  • Related article  • Similar articles in this journal  Topic Collections  • Pediatric Ophthalmology  • Randomized Controlled Trial  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

In the article entitled "Two-Year Follow-up of a 6-Month Randomized Trial of Atropine vs Patching for Treatment of Moderate Amblyopia in Children," the authors in the Pediatric Eye Disease Investigator Group "could identify no sources of bias or confounding to explain our [their] findings."¹ There are, nonetheless, substantive questions about the study’s methodology.

Among these is that "the study protocol specified retesting of all sound eyes with vision worse than 20/20, whereas amblyopic eyes were not retested."¹ According to Lancaster, "There is abundant evidence for the general proposition that exercises, repetition, practice, and learning lead to better performance."² Different testing methods may have increased the disparity between the eyes.

The lack of untreated controls makes it impossible to distinguish the beneficial effects of training and increasing literacy from the presumed benefits of treatment. The Pediatric Eye Disease Investigator Group authors "agree that inclusion of an untreated control group would have . . . [Full Text of this Article]

AUTHOR INFORMATION
Philip Lempert, MD

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?

RELATED LETTER

Contradictions in the Amblyopia Treatment Studies—Reply
Michael X. Repka, David K. Wallace, Roy W. Beck, Raymond T. Kraker, Eileen E. Birch, Susan A. Cotter, Sean Donahue, Donald F. Everett, Richard W. Hertle, Jonathan M. Holmes, Graham E. Quinn, Mitchell M. Scheiman, David R. Weakley, and for the Pediatric Eye Disease Investigator Group
Arch Ophthalmol. 2006;124(2):285-287.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

RELATED ARTICLE

Two-Year Follow-up of a 6-Month Randomized Trial of Atropine vs Patching for Treatment of Moderate Amblyopia in Children
The Pediatric Eye Disease Investigator Group
Arch Ophthalmol. 2005;123(2):149-157.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT