Q: I have a three-month-old male baby. He has a slight squint in his left eye. I took him to see the doctor who said there was nothing to worry about and it would most likely straighten out on its own. Is that true? Should he wear glasses or an eye patch to strengthen his lazy eye?
A: Squint occurs when both eyes are not pointing in the same direction. The condition is also known as lazy eye, cross eye or wandering eye. Medically it’s called strabismus.
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The squint may be convergent when the eyes point toward one another or divergent when one or both eyes turn outward. A vertical squint is less common where one or both eyes turn upward.
A simple screening test for strabismus is the Hirschberg test. A flashlight is shone in the patient’s eye. When the child looks at the light, you can see a reflection on the pupil. If the eyes are properly aligned, then the reflection will be in the same spot of each eye. If this is not the case, the eyes are not properly aligned.
Lazy eye or amblyopia is common in newborn babies, but if it persists after three to six months, the infant should be assessed by a doctor. It tends to run in families and often the eyes straighten out as the child grows with no treatment required.
Non-surgical treatment involves the use of glasses with one side covered with a patch to force the lazy eye to work harder to receive signals from the brain.
In more resistant cases, surgery may be needed to shorten one or more of the external muscles that control eye movement.
The problem with this is that the muscle may be over shortened and as the child grows, the eye can be pulled too far in the opposite direction.
Q: My elderly uncle has recently been diagnosed with lung cancer but he never smoked and did not work in a smoky environment, although some people did smoke in his office. How did this happen?
A: Unfortunately, lung cancer in non-smokers is still the sixth most common cause of cancer deaths in North America. However, most of these are not the same as the smokers’ type of cancer.
Patients with this type seem to have a better prognosis and response to chemotherapy. The problem with lung cancer is it tends not to be diagnosed until the disease has progressed too far. Often, it first appears to be pneumonia and cancer is not suspected until it keeps recurring or does not respond to antibiotics.
Researchers are working on identifying lung cancer in non-smokers earlier using blood test biomarkers.
