A new National Institutes of Health study is lending credence to vision therapy as a treatment for convergence insufficiency, a vision disorder that may affect one of every eight people across the United States.

Convergence insufficiency occurs when the eyes have difficulty looking at objects close up because they drift, causing double vision and other reading problems.

Jill Buss, the mother of three grade-school children in north Orem, said reading was always an uphill battle for her seven-year-old son. He underwent three eye surgeries in the first years of life to correct congenital problems before they tried vision therapy.

"We were working very hard -- I was reading with him every day, there was a tutor working with him twice a week, we were going to a computer tutoring lab," she said.

"This is the type of resolution that a parent dreams of. Without it, he would have been headed straight for an ADD diagnosis, because he was going crazy at school."

Vision therapy -- a relatively new and controversial means of treatment -- received a big boost when the study by the NIH's National Eye Institute was published in this month's issue of Archives of Ophthalmology, concluding that three-fourths of patients receiving a combination of office-based therapy and home-based assignments showed improvement.

Those results are in stark contrast to a paper about learning disorders by the American Academy of Pediatrics, written in 1998 and reaffirmed by the organization in February of this year, which argues, "No scientific evidence exists for the efficacy of eye exercises ['vision therapy'] ... in the remediation of these complex pediatric developmental and neurologic conditions."

Vision therapy generally includes a series of doctor-supervised exercises done once or twice a week to strengthen the connections between the brain and the eyes -- physical therapy for the eyes, as it's touted among its practitioners. Optical traditionalists discount its use, saying many of the symptoms it's meant to treat -- delayed learning, lack of focus and similar problems -- should instead be treated as learning issues like attention deficit disorder.

But Dr. Robin Price of the Child & Family EyeCare Center in Pleasant Grove says the new study further validates the work he's been doing for a long time. Instead of diagnosing behavioral disorders, he helps children with vision problems make up lost ground in school through vision therapy.

"They may look like they want to get up or they're distracted, when really they're just having a hard time," he said. "The reason we see it more in kids is because they're in school."

The NIH study looked at 221 children between 9 and 17 over a 12-week period. Other groups, including those who used only home-based therapy and those who used placebo treatments, reported improvements between 33 and 43 percent of the time.

• Ace Stryker can be reached at 344-2556 or astryker@heraldextra.com.