Prentice-Memorial Lecture: Is the animal model for stimulus deprivation amblyopia in children valid or useful?

The animal models are not, strictly speaking, valid for clinical application to children, primarily because of the large differences in the duration of the critical or sensitive period. However, they do provide a useful conceptual framework to follow, especially while determining the waxing and waning of the amblyopia in each eye by preferential looking or visual evoked potential acuity methods. These methods allow us to detect or determine the degree of amblyopia and guide the treatment or prevention of stimulus deprivation amblyopia in each child by direct measurement. The reciprocal effect of amblyopia found by Thomas, Mohindra and Held in infants by the preferential looking method and confirmed and extended in age by our group with the visual evoked potential acuity method could have been predicted by the animal modelers from the cross-suturing experiments. It appears that more harm than good may be done by patching infants for the treatment of amblyopia without measuring the acuity of each eye to avoid the significant loss of connections to the patched eye and to both eyes (binocular units).