Myopia rates are increasing around the world from decade to decade. But the solutions to this epidemic may be clearer than we think.
In the late 1970s, it was quite unusual to see a child need glasses. However, over the past 30 years, there has been an increase in myopia, especially among children.
Currently, around 33% of young people between 5 and 19 years old have myopia. In 1990, it was just one room. If this trend continues, the rate will be around 40% em 2050 – that is, 740 million young people who are myopic.
“Myopia is a disease and tin economic and quality of life implications far-reaching,” said K. Davina Frick and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine em Marylandhas .
However, as the same magazine writes, experts are increasingly convinced that the epidemic can be slowed – or even reversed.
Glasses, contact lenses or even the laser eye surgerywhich permanently alters the shape of the cornea, can correct blur caused by myopia, but do not cure the underlying problem.
“You don’t get a new retina – it has to stretch to accommodate the growth of the eye and that’s when you see thinning of the edges”, to New Scientist, Katherine Weise from the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
This increases the risk of four diseases that can lead to irreversible blindness: retinal detachment, myopic macular degeneration, glaucoma and severe cataracts.
Causes of the great “global blur”
There is evidence that myopia is starting earlier, as early as 3 years of age. Estimates predict that Half of the world’s population will be myopic by 2050.
Although myopia has a genetic component, Don Mutti of Ohio State University thinks the increase is happening too quickly to be due to genetic changes, “so we need to focus on the environmental factors“.
Several culprits have been proposed – poor diets, urbanization, increased screen time – but the evidence for all of them is weak. For many years, it was believed that “near work,” that is, any activity that requires close focus, was one of the causes of myopia. But “there is no evidence”knee Mutti.
Excessive time indoors emerges here as an unexpected villain.
Save your eyes, go out into the street
The power of increasing the time children spend outdoors was demonstrated by a study carried out in Taiwan, and now detailed by New Scientist.
In 2001, 34.8% of children aged between 6 and 12 were myopic; by 2010, that number had increased to 49.1%.
Motivated by the belief that excessive close work was behind the dizzying increase, the government introduced changes to the school curriculum that year, with 2 hours of outdoor activity per day.
Although close work was probably not the cause of childhood myopia, the experiment worked: within four years, the rate of new cases in Taiwan down from a peak of 50% of children between 7 and 12 years old to 46.1% – and, although it has not yet returned to the value recorded in the 1980s, continues to decrease.
Another more recent large-scale “unintentional” experience also highlighted the importance of time outdoors: .
According to several studies correlating lockdown policies and myopia progression, myopia rates increased dramatically in countries where children had to stay indoors for long periods.
At this point, an apparent connection emerges between myopia and “near work” that is avoided when away from home. However, there is still a lack of evidence that the problem is closely associated with this “work”.
“There is no strong evidence that what children are doing indoors is a specific source of the myopia problem; but there is about the fact that they are inside the house”, says Mutti.
The objective now is to identify the benefits of the outdoors, so that we can begin to bring the benefits of the outdoors indoors. This could mean changing schools’ interior lighting, for example, to better mimic natural light, suggests Rick Born of Harvard Medical School.
Researchers believe that ways to solve the global problem of myopia are finally becoming clear.
Revolutionary treatment in focus
And behold, “unintentionally”, a new revolutionary emerged: repeated low-level red light therapy (RLRL).
This therapy developed to treat amblyopiaor lazy eye, but inadvertently found to slow the progression of myopia – and, in some cases, caused her to regress.
As New Scientist explains, here, laser light with a wavelength of 650 nanometers and luminance of 1600 lux is projected onto the retina for about 3 minutes, twice a day.
In 2022, a study from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, the results of a clinical trial of RLRL therapy, finding that this significantly slowed the progression of myopia.
Unexpectedly, they also found that, in around 40% of participants, the eyeball length decreased and vision improved.
Although this phenomenon sometimes happens spontaneously, in this case it was much more common in people who have been treated.
Other studies that used this therapy obtained similar results.
