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Posted Friday by CBC:

Canadian researchers have found out how to restore normal vision to kittens with a lazy eye without using an eye patch.

The cure was relatively simple — putting the kittens in complete darkness for 10 days. Once the kittens were returned to daylight, they regained normal vision in the lazy eye within a week, reported researchers at AV¾ãÀÖ²¿ in Halifax in the journal Current Biology this month.

Lazy eye is a condition where the brain effectively turns off one eye. It affects about four per cent of the population in humans, and the most common treatment is fix the vision problem (for example, by using glasses) and then patch the good eye, forcing the person to use their bad eye.

Treatment is most effective in younger children.

Kevin Duffy, a neuroscientist who co-authored the new study, told CBC's Quirks & Quarks that the condition is typically the result of a vision problem such as a cataract, a misalignment of the eyes, or poor focus in one eye, which then causes the brain to develop abnormally.

"If the eye is providing abnormal vision, then the circuits that connect to that eye are going to develop abnormally," he said. The brain "becomes effectively disconnected."

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