Binocular vision and research

Although good binocular vision is an important prerequisite for symptom-free vision, its importance to professionals today sometimes seems less relevant than in the past. There are various reasons for this, which I will not discuss in this editorial. However, it is a fact that in recent years, fewer research projects on binocular vision have become known in German-speaking countries in Europe than in the past.

Internationally, however, the publication rate is still high, as a PubMed search with the terms “Binocular Vision 2024” from July 6, 2024 shows. The 343 publications listed here included new books as well as research papers and literature reviews on a wide variety of issues relating to the entire complex of binocular vision. A very interesting paper in this context was published by Wiecek et al. with the title ‘Peripheral Binocular Imbalance in Anisometropic and Strabismic Amblyopia’ in the IOVS April 2024 issue.¹ In this study, the scientists investigated differences in peripheral binocular imbalance in children with anisometropic amblyopia, strabismus-induced amblyopia and normal binocular vision. A central result of the publication was that based on the differences found in the various amblyopia subtypes, individualized dichoptic treatment is recommended to reduce amblyopia.

Another very interesting study was published by Chu-chu Zhuang et al. in the January 2024 issue of the ‘Journal of Ophthalmology’ with the title ‘Accommodation and Binocular Vision in Children with Myopic Anisometropia’.² This research also focussed on anisometropia and its influence on binocular vision. There was a clear statistically significant correlation between myopic anisometropia and the quality of various binocular vision functions. The study also found that anisometropia was positively correlated with age, accommodative response and near stereopsis and negatively correlated with amplitude of accommodation and distance and near heterophoria. The width of accommodation decreased with increasing anisometropia and the distance to the normal age values of accommodation increased.

Two interesting publications on binocular vision are presented in the current OCL issue. These include an original paper on ‘How disruptive are monocular reading conditions really? A new analysis of 260 data sets to describe the binocular advantage in reading’ and a case study dealing with “Optometric Vision Therapy”.

In his foreword to the fourth edition of the book ‘Pickwell`s  Binocular Vision Anomalies’, the author Bruce J. W. Evens, writes: ‘There are many theories and therapies for binocular vision anomalies, and it can be difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff’.³
With this in mind, I would like to see many more research activities to improve the diagnosis and treatment of binocular vision disorders.