Why do we now believe that the myopia epidemic can be slowed – or even reversed?

I distinctly remember getting my first pair of glasses as a kid. My mom is very near sighted and sends me to the optometrist every year. My older sister was diagnosed around eight years old, and I prayed I wouldn’t follow suit for fear of ridicule, but by the time I was the same age, the world had become a blur. A visit that year to the optometrist confirmed it, and I’ve worn glasses or contact lenses ever since.

At that time, in the late 1970s, it was unusual to need glasses at such a young age. Not more than that. Over the past 30 years, there has been a boom in nearsightedness, or myopia, especially among children. Today, about a third of children ages 5 to 19 are myopic, up from a quarter in 1990. If this trend continues, the rate will be about 40 percent by 2050 – Or 740 million myopic young people.

This is more than just an inconvenience. “Myopia is a disease,” he says your. Davina Frick at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Maryland, who co-chaired a talk National Academy of Sciences National Committee on Condition. “It has a wide range Quality of life and economic impacts“, she says, not least because of the risk of mobilization in severe cases. However, researchers increasingly believe that the epidemic could be slowed – or even reversed.

Most myopia is axial, meaning that the axis of the eyeball—the space between the cornea in front and the light-sensitive retina in the back—grows too long. This means that the light entering the eye is focused in front of…