Reading Ability of Children Treated for Amblyopia

Abstract

There are previous reports of compromised reading ability in children with amblyopia, but standardized psychoeducational tests have not been used. Standardized tests are normed with a large sample size and are important for assessing the practical consequences of poor reading ability, such as eligibility for reading supports at school. It is also not clear how amblyopia treatment impacts reading ability. Thus, the goal of this study was to use standardized tests to compare binocular reading performance in children treated for amblyopia to that of a large normative sample, as well as to the types of control groups used in previous studies. Children (7-17 years, M = 11.94 years) treated for strabismic or anisometropic amblyopia (N=11) were compared to children treated for strabismus without amblyopia (N=8) and to control children with healthy vision (N=43). Visual acuity (near and distance), intellectual functioning (WJ III COG), single-word reading (TOWRE 2) and paragraph reading (GORT 5) were assessed. The control group performed significantly better than the amblyopic and strabismic groups on both reading tasks, however, mean performance was within the average range for all groups. While mean scores were in the average range, there were 6 children (4 with amblyopia; 2 with strabismus) who performed below average (< 16th percentile) on at least one reading task. Although all children with amblyopia completed occlusion therapy, some still had visual acuity above 0.2 LogMAR, but reading scores were not correlated with visual acuity. Finally, all children had at least average intellectual functioning. Using standardized tests, we found poorer reading performance in children with amblyopia compared to age-matched controls, and several children read at a level that might benefit from reading supports at school. A similar pattern of performance was observed in children with strabismus without amblyopia, suggesting both strabismus and amblyopia can disrupt reading ability. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2017