Running towards amblyopia recovery

Gabriele Sansevero,Alessandro Sale,Nicoletta Berardi,Tommaso Pizzorusso,Claudia Torelli,Alan Consorti,Raffaele Mazziotti

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-69630-7

Gabriele Sansevero, Alessandro Sale + Show 5 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-69630-7

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Abstract

Amblyopia is a neurodevelopmental disorder of the visual cortex arising from abnormal visual experience early in life which is a major cause of impaired vision in infants and young children (prevalence around 3.5%). Current treatments such as eye patching are ineffective in a large number of patients, especially when applied after the juvenile critical period. Physical exercise has been recently shown to enhance adult visual cortical plasticity and to promote visual acuity recovery. With the aim to understand the potentialities for translational applications, we investigated the effects of voluntary physical activity on recovery of depth perception in adult amblyopic rats with unrestricted binocular vision; visual acuity recovery was also assessed. We report that three weeks of voluntary physical activity (free running) induced a marked and long-lasting recovery of both depth perception and visual acuity. In the primary visual cortex, ocular dominance recovered both for excitatory and inhibitory cells and was linked to activation of a specific intracortical GABAergic circuit.

Highlights

Amblyopia is a neurodevelopmental disorder of the visual cortex arising from abnormal visual experience early in life which is a major cause of impaired vision in infants and young children
To investigate the effects of voluntary physical activity on visual function recovery in adult amblyopic rats, we compared visual abilities in a group of adult long-term deprived rats subjected to three weeks of completely free running, with those of sedentary animals reared in conventional standard conditions, and with those of non-deprived rats
The findings reported in the present study show that voluntary physical activity performed under binocular conditions in the usual visual environment promotes a marked and long lasting recovery of visual functions in adult amblyopic rats

Summary

Introduction

Amblyopia is a neurodevelopmental disorder of the visual cortex arising from abnormal visual experience early in life which is a major cause of impaired vision in infants and young children (prevalence around 3.5%). Recent findings from independent laboratories demonstrated that physical activity in adult amblyopic rodents promotes visual cortex plasticity, recovery of visual cortical neuron responses to the deprived e ye[9] and recovery from amblyopia[12]; these effects have been linked to the modulation of GABAergic circuitries in V1, a fundamental brake for plasticity in the adult brain[9,12]. Despite this evidence, several crucial issues remain to be addressed to fully understand the potentialities of physical activity training for translational applications. The long-term maintenance of visual function recovery after the end of physical training, an essential clinical requirement, has not been investigated so far

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