I vividly remember getting my first pair of glasses as a child. My mother is very nearsighted and sent me to the optician every year. My older sister was diagnosed at age 8 and I prayed that I wouldn’t go on for fear of being ridiculed, but by the time I was the same age, the world was fading. A visit to the optician that year confirmed it, and I’ve been wearing glasses or contact lenses ever since.
Back then, in the late 1970s, it was quite unusual to need glasses at such a young age. No more Over the past 30 years, myopia, or myopia, has increased, especially among children. Today, about a third of young people between the ages of 5 and 19 are myopic, up from a quarter in 1990. If this trend continues, the rate will be approx. 40% by 2050 – or 740 million short-sighted young people.
That is more than a drawback. “Myopia is a disease,” he says K. Davina Frick at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Maryland, where he recently directed a US National Academy of Sciences committee on this condition. “He has a wide career quality of life and economic consequences”, he says, not only the risk of going blind in serious cases. Increasingly, however, researchers believe that the epidemic may be slowed, or even reversed.
Most cases of myopia are axial, that is, the axis of the eyeball – the distance between the cornea at the front and the retina at the back with light – is too long. This means that the light entering the eye is placed in front of the central…
