Why myopia

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Gong Q, et al. Efficacy and adverse effects of atropine in childhood myopia: A meta-analysis. JAMA Ophthalmology. AOA promotes eye health to video gamers. What specifically causes the eyeball to grow longer is currently unknown, however we are aware of other factors which can cause myopia. For instance, myopia commonly runs in families so you are more likely to develop it if both sides of your family are short-sighted. How much time you spend outside and indoors can also affect your eye sight.

Spending a disproportionate amount of your time reading, writing, or at a computer can trigger myopia. Although the contrasts between outdoor and indoor lighting can also increase the degree of myopia during the development stage, so ensuring you have a balance of sunlight and artificial light will help to reduce the strain on your eyes and the degree of myopia. The eye condition is also more common in some demographics.

For instance, myopia is more common in people with Asian roots. Myopia typically develops around puberty, but its onset can be at any age. As myopia is caused by the eye growing longer, it usually becomes worse as a child progresses into adulthood. Symptoms of myopia vary between person to person.

Short-sightedness usually starts around puberty and gets worse over time until the eye is fully grown. By looking out for certain signs you can identify myopia in children, such as noticing how they may sit close to the TV or ask to sit at the front of the class so they can see the whiteboard.

Children may also rub their eyes regularly or complain about headaches. If you think you or a loved one might have myopia, an eye test will determine if you are short-sighted, and you will be given a prescription for contact lenses or glasses to help correct your vision. And, with just a few simple measures, our children may be prevented from the same blurry decline that has plagued our own generation.

The idea that poor eyesight is primarily genetic had never really rung true for me, anyway. In fact, the experiences of the Inuit in Canada should have settled that question nearly 50 years ago. Over that same period, the Inuit had started to leave their traditional lifestyles of hunting and fishing for a more Western way of life — a far more likely cause of their decline. Our genes may still play a role in deciding who becomes short-sighted, but it was only through a change in environment that the problems began to emerge.

Part of that change would have been education and literacy — one of the most common explanations for short-sightedness. At first the evidence seemed to be strong: just look at the sea of glinting specs in any university lecture theatre or academic conference, and you would seem to find proof of a link. Yet epidemiological studies suggest the effects are much smaller than once believed.

One large study following the progress of children in Ohio appeared to show no correlation at all with reading, though we should not yet rule out the effect completely, says Jacobsen. Instead, many now argue that it is the time spent indoors, rather than reading per se, that matters most. Study after study, from Europe , Australia , and Asia , have all found that people who spend more time outside are far less likely to get short-sighted than people whose lives are mostly confined within four walls.

Why would that be? One popular explanation is that sunlight somehow nourishes the eyes. Scott Read at Queensland University of Technology, for instance, recently equipped a group of schoolchildren with a special watch that recorded their overall movements, and the light intensity, every 30 seconds for two weeks. The kids with good eyesight turned out to be no more active than those with specs — ruling out the possibility that exercise and general good health protect the eyes. Instead, glasses prescriptions seemed to hinge, almost exclusively, on the time spent in the sunshine.

Bright sunlight can be thousands of times more intense than lighting inside though your eyes may mask the difference — and the more sunlight the children enjoyed, the less likely they were to need glasses.