LASIK eye surgery for children

LASIK surgery, commonly used to correct vision in adults, has been found to be a safe option for some children with nearsightedness. Researchers in Ireland found that the laser procedure improved visual acuity in six children who were significantly nearsighted. Five of the children had amblyopia, or 'lazy eye', a condition in which the brain favours one eye, leaving the other with much poorer vision.LASIK, which uses a laser to reshape the eye's cornea, is an increasingly common way to correct common vision problems in adults. However, it was not considered suitable for children. An exception may be made when a young child has one highly nearsighted eye, and the goal of LASIK is to give the child symmetric vision. Otherwise, it is generally considered inappropriate to perform LASIK in children and teenagers, in large part because they are growing and their vision is still changing. Though adults usually opt for LASIK for the sake of convenience or cosmetics, these are never reasons for which doctors would do it in children.Doctors from the Mater Private Hospital and Children's University Hospital in Dublin described the cases of six children they treated with LASIK. The children were selected for the procedure because conventional treatments for lazy eye - glasses, contact lenses and patching the strong eye to force the weak one to do the work - had all failed. Two years after the surgery, five of the children had greater visual acuity. One patient showed no improvement because the child did not comply with post-operative patching of the eye.

The doctors stressed that only a small number of children are appropriate candidates for LASIK, and that the procedure should be an option only if conventional treatments for lazy eye have failed.

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