I have a few questions regarding myopia.
1) Do screens actually cause myopia, if so how, is it how closely it sits from our eyes, if it’s in the darkness or is it the screen itself
2) Can myopia get worse, or does it stop and stabilise at a certain age?
3) Are there ways to reverse/treat myopia?
In: Biology
Myopia is a hardware distortion in the eye. There is some effect that’s a function of the strength of the eye muscles used to adjust the focus of the inter-ocular lens. Myopia caused by the growth of the skull isn’t going to be impacted by screens or anything else.
Presbyopia is certainly going to happen as you age. This will make it harder to read nearby things, such as screens, because the lens will stiffen and get too hard to stretch. This might have a cross-over effect with myopia, but it’s not really a treatment or cure.
Myopia is generally thought to be caused by lack of intense lighting falling on the eye during development…in other words, your eyes grow too long as a kid because you don’t spend enough time outdoors in full sun as a small child, and this means your eyes don’t get the “image in focus, stop growing” signal produced by bright light focused on the back of the eye. So your eyes grow too long front to back causing myopia.
Myopia tends to stabilize a bit once you and your eyes stop growing, but can still slowly change after that. It doesn’t really get better.
You can wear glasses or get surgery, that’s about it.
Hello.
Not a professional but here’s how I remember it (I am myopic):
Imagine your eye is like a ball. The ball has a small hole. Light from your surroundings is supposed to enter the inside of the ball through this hole. Ideally, this light is supposed to fall on the inner surface of the ball for you to be able to see clearly.
But due to some medical reason (eye ball shape or muscle of the eye, e.g), the light falls in front of the inner surface of the eye. Making the surrounding object not clear.
Now imagine keeping that object in its place but you move the ball closer to the object. As you do, the light would now move closer and closer to the inner surface of the ball and eventually land on the ball. This moving the ball closer to the light source means you are coming closer to the object and can see the object if it is closer to your eye.
Hence when you are myopic (near sighted), you can see objects closer to you but not far away. The glasses / lenses correct this behaviour.
Your myopia can get worse. I don’t know if it can get better, LASIK means that the answer to that is probably a yes.
Mine has more or less stabilized.
Hope that helped!
Typically, the eye is too big/long, and instead of being a sphere, it is sort of an oval-ish shape. This changes where the patient can focus, specifically making them only able to focus on things that are close.
There are other ways to have short-sightedness, but this is the common way to grow up and develope it – your eyeballs get a bit too big.
There is decent evidence that there is a genetic component, but also that a lack of sunlight contributes. My optometrist told me that a study in china tried to see if instructing parents to force their children to have minium amounts of outside time (in order to get sunlight) could impact myopia rates. The results strongly pointed to ‘yes’. They couldn’t tell if there was some minimum amount you should get, however, since in aggregate the parents failed to actually force their children to spend quite as much time outside as the scientists requested, because the parents wanted their children to have more time to study.
So, ‘near work’ doesn’t directly cause myopia, but ‘being the kind of person who does lots of near work’ probably means you spend time inside, lack sunlight, and that lack of sunlight seems likely to increase the risk of myopia.
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It tends to get worse while growing, and then stabalise, or slow down.
My prescription I think stabalised around 2.5 diopters, but the optomitrist notes a drift of maybe 0.25 dipoters every few years, slowing down as I get older. It might stabalise, or slowly get worse with age.
There’s one big piece that we understand – your eyeball changes shape to adjust focus. When you look at things that are very close up, your eyes can actually adapt to that constant need to focus up close and the eyeball elongates. Eventually it basically focuses in the wrong spot (compared to your retina in the back of your eye) and lenses are needed to get the focus in the right spot for things farther away. It can progress to become pretty severe. There’s some evidence that you can reverse the process as well.
A similar example would be when someone wears high heels all the time. Their calf muscles can actually shorten. It takes time and specific work to get them back to their natural functioning state.
Why some people’s eyes respond like this and other people’s don’t is the part we don’t understand. There’s probably a mix of environmental and genetic components.
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