I vividly remember buying my first pair of glasses as a child. My mother is extremely nearsighted and takes me to the optician every year. My sister was diagnosed when she was about 8 years old, and I prayed she wouldn’t do it because she was afraid of being made fun of, but by the time I was her age, the world had become blurry. A visit to the optician that year confirmed it, and I’ve been wearing glasses or contact lenses ever since.
In the late 1970s, it was extremely unusual for someone to need glasses at such a young age. No more. Over the past 30 years, myopia has increased rapidly, especially among children. Approximately one-third of young people aged five to 19 are now nearsighted, up from one-quarter in 1990. If this trend continues, the proportion will be around 40%, or 740 million young people, myopic by 2050.
It’s more than an inconvenience. “Myopia is a disease,” says K. Davina Frick of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Maryland, who co-chaired a recent National Academy of Sciences committee on myopia. “It has far-reaching implications for quality of life and the economy,” she says, and in particularly severe cases there is a risk of blindness. But researchers are increasingly thinking that the epidemic can be slowed or even reversed.
Most cases of myopia are axial. This means that the axis of the eyeball, the distance between the cornea at the front and the light-sensing retina at the back, becomes too long. This means that the light that enters your eyes is focused right in front of your eyes.
(Tags to translate) Sensory
