Short-Sightedness Was Rare. In Asia, It Is Becoming Ubiquitous - Slashdot
source link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/22/06/11/0134240/short-sightedness-was-rare-in-asia-it-is-becoming-ubiquitous
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Short-Sightedness Was Rare. In Asia, It Is Becoming Ubiquitous
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Elsewhere on the continent things are even worse. One study of male high-school leavers in Seoul found 97% were short-sighted. Hong Kong and Singapore are not far behind. And although the problem is worst in East Asia, it is not unique to it. Reliable numbers for America and Europe are harder to come by. But one review article, published in 2015, claimed a European rate of between 20% and 40% -- an order of magnitude higher than that which people working in the field think is the "natural," background rate. For most of those affected, myopia is a lifelong, expensive nuisance. But severe myopia can lead to untreatable vision loss, says Annegret Dahlmann-Noor, a consultant ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital, in London. A paper published in 2019 concluded that each one-dioptre worsening in myopia was associated with a 67% increase in prevalence of myopic maculopathy, an untreatable condition that causes blindness. (A dioptre is a measure of a lens's focusing power.) In some parts of East Asia, 20% of young people have severe myopia, defined as -6 dioptres or worse (see chart 2 in linked story). "This is storing up a big problem for the coming decades," says Kathryn Rose, head of orthoptics at the University of Technology, Sydney.
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Short-Sightedness Was Rare. In Asia, It Is Becoming Ubiquitous (economist.com)
This explains Sony's mobile strategy.
I think you mean nearsightedness (myopia). Yes, in British English, shortsighted can also mean nearsighted, but in U.S. English, shortsighted is (approximately) always metaphorical, referring to not being able to see what's coming in the future.
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I'm embarrassed that I'd never heard the term "school leavers" before. Is this a common term? If so, I assume the problem is me spending too much time in my "Ameri-bubble".
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Wait...what? They call a sidewalk just "pavement"? So their roads aren't pavement? And what if it's an unpaved sidewalk?
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Have you thought that perhaps one term comes from the other? Imagine the decisions a short-sighted person makes when they canâ(TM)t see ahead of themselves.
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No the terms are unrelated. Etymology of compound words are always directly linked to the words from which they are comprised. The two terms are related to each other only to the extent that they share the word "sighted" as one of their compounds.
Beyond that, "near" and "short" have their own unique definitions and etymologies.
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Imagine being so short-sighted you can't even see this affects the entire species.
Humans have been addicted to the Disease of Greed for thousands of years. Endless warmongering repeating the worst of our history, tends to confirm why we're so ignorantly short-sighted we'll probably extinct ourselves right here on this dying rock.
Pull a few more inexplicable things out of the sand, and we're likely to find enough evidence that we've been dumb enough to do it before.
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People seem to forget that the eye has muscles, and thus also benefits as you age from workouts, just like any other muscles.
That's why it is really good to get away from the computer from time to time and do stuff that requires or uses longer vision, like hiking or even just lots of outdoor walking.
There are even applications to help you exercise your eyes though I'm not sure how well that works, but it may be worth researching.
As I get older in my case by long range vision is fine but I find my short-rang
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My eyes worked fine for what do most of the time, reading, writing, coding. I need glasses to see things out side sometimes, and as I got older my outside vision actually got better. If myopia leads to blindness it is likely other factors. Normal development in modern humans is to start myopic and improve. My vision is made for 21st century work, not picking fruit.
Glasses are needed in school because they are old fashioned and expect kids to read off boards meters away. Every kid should have a computer,
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I think that winning battles would be more strongly correlated with successful drone hits, not misses.
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You're making the error of thinking that long vision uses different eye muscles or that it doesn't require eye "strength" to focus at short distances. Myopia is probably an environmental malady caused by modern civilization having kids spending too much time continually reading, spending too much time in front of the computer screen, etc. Once the eye muscles start experiencing a problem focusing, it rarely can be naturally corrected.
To prevent or minimize this epidemic of vision focus deterioration, the
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That's because those eye muscles you're referring to lose their elasticity over time, just like how your skin loses its elasticity and causes you to turn into a prune, or how your dick goes limp and you have to get the Viagra. But sadly there's no eye Viagra.
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So clearly eye viagra is the solution!
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The muscles for the eye are to rotate it to point in different directions.
It is a myth that exercising your eyes can prevent nearsightedness. This is caused not due to any muscular issue, but because the lens of your eyes gradually loses flexibility as you age, decreasing the range across which your vision operates.
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Crap... meant to include a link in the above post: https://www.mykidsvision.org/b... [mykidsvision.org]
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You mean somebody went through all of that effort to write that article and they never covered the oldest myth about myopia? You know the one, involving something you do with your hands when you're bored.
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blindness isn't remotely the same thing as myopia.
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Blindness is a spectrum. Myopia is one possible part of that spectrum.
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Interestingly, you comment is quite myopic.
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Damn, I thought he meant building card castles. Good thing you're around to make sure we all have the same insights into "dick culture" that you do!
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Can someone who is from America please explain to someone who is not the stance of being so utterly preoccupied with how someone may be inclined to vote that it seems to even pervade how people evidently resort to using it as a form of namecalling towards someone they might disagree with?
I mean leaving aside that such retorts are usually the resort of a person who doesn't have anything intelligent to contribute to the conversation, I notice this style of ad-hominem is used quite regularly in online forum
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Tribalism. If you are not one-of-us, you are other. Other is BAD.
If you disagree with me, then you are not one-of-us... so you must be from the other (BAD) tribe. That makes you a Republicant, or a Demoncrat...
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Near sight here sucks, until I'm away from a laptop/smartshftphone for a couple days
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Only that these muscles have zero to do with nearsightedness.
Nearsightedness is caused by your eyes being too large. Too long, to be precise. Alternatively, your vitreous body has a refraction power higher than normal. In either case, the image would be in focus before it hits your image receptors and hence the image is again out of focus when it finally hits the background of your eye.
Muscles do play a role in Presbyopia [wikipedia.org], it's often also called "age-related farsightedness", which is a misnomer. You're not
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Myopia is a mixed bag when it comes to presbyopia.
Think of myopia & hyperopia this way: your eye starts out with approximately 15-20 diopters of accommodation range. Myopia & hyperopia determine where the "far point" is, and accommodation is what enables you to focus on things that are closer. The far point is fixed... accommodation only extends your focal depth TOWARDS you.
Presbyopia emerges as your cornea hardens over time & becomes less flexible. In other words, your range decreases, so you
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This study was a good start, but to your point perhaps we now go focus a study on societies where bad eyesight is still rare or even improving while we still can. Might find a more accurate solution to slowing or stopping visual degradation.
If laziness (atrophy due to lack of eye muscle activity) is a factor, would those employed in jobs that require a lot of eye movement, have almost little or no degradation over time or even with age? Might be a fairly simple data set to analyze.
Unfortunately, Mass Addi
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The actual proper term is "near-sightedness"
But if you really want to talk about short-sightedness, there are a lot of people whose shortsightedness can't comprehend the term.
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And google says...it's a British thing.
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My headline vote was for "blind bastards need to get out more"
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I remember reading about this before. It seems to correlates pretty well with how much exposure one gets to the outdoors as a child - meaning sunlight. I'm not sure, though, if it's actually D3-related or if it's exposure to the bright sunlight itself (muscle exercise, basically).
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Before Alaska became a state of the United States in 1959, the incidence of short-sightedness (also known as near-sightedness) among the native Aleuts was almost zero. After attaining statehood, the government opened schools and Aleut children became school students, spending large amounts of time reading which they had not done before. Almost immediately, the incidence of near-sightedness shot up to around 25%.
It is known that in a person's early years, an exquisitely fine-tuned chemical feedback loop is active in determining the final shape of the cornea, the part of the eye that performs most of the refraction of light necessary for a focused image on the retina. (The lens provides a secondary, variable, stage to adjust for distance.) It seems that in some fraction of people who spend a lot of time focusing on a nearby object such as a book or cell phone, that feedback loop decides that the best shape of the cornea is that which provides a default focusing for near objects, with the deformable lens unable to correct in the sense opposite to that for which it was intended.
It this is correct, having children spend more time outside would seem to be helpful but this probably does not recognize the underlying cause, which is not that kids spend too much time indoors per se but that they spend too much time reading. The increase in nearsightedness around the world in recent years quite possibly relates to increased time looking at smart phones. Of course there is likely a connection to how much different cultures encourage academic performance.
It is interesting to speculate that if susceptible children could be identified, they could be given "pre-corrective" lenses to wear only while reading or using a phone, tricking the feedback loop to settle on a more-normal cornea shape.
I'm sorry that I can't provide a reference for the Alaska story, but I am sure it sits somewhere on my bookshelf.
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A far simpler solution than "pre-corrective" lenses is: STOP wearing eyeglasses when one is outside classroom or not sitting at the back of classroom. When one have only mild-shortsightedness due to life habit, the parents follow the opticians' instruction absentmindedly and buy eyeglasses for their children to wear it all day long. Then the children's shortsightedness worsen the next year. The opticians merrily sell new eyeglasses to the parents. Rinse and repeat. Now most children are suffering shortsight
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Nope. The overwhelming majority of cases of myopia are not diagnosed until after school. Just look around at a typical school and that should tell you all you need to know. These studies are coming out showing that a good half of students actually need corrective lenses, yet only a small fraction of people have any.
Also this has been studied to death, and those studies even have had meta studies on them: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... [nih.gov] Only *incorrect* prescriptions make myopia worse. And there's no furth
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I've played with a few lenses enough to estimate that I need somewhere between a -.25 and a -.3 diopter correction at infinity, pretty much certainly as a result of computer screens. So I bought a pair of weak +1 readers specifically to wear during my being-a-nerd induced hours spent staring at a screen an arm's length in front of me. That way my eyes can spend all those hours focused at infinity instead of at 1 meter and either slowly correct this or keep it from getting worse.
Even after a relatively short interval, I find that while initially the screen is percepitably (if slightly) out of focus, it eventually focuses correctly, indicating that my eyes are indeed able to eventually relax towards something close to a perfect focus at infinity still.
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I volunteer to help them fix their myopic genetics with the help of my 20/20 vision seed. Esp the qt Japanese.
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I had better than 20/20 vision until just a few years ago, even after 3 decades in front of a screen daily. Now I can't read anything without glasses anymore. Aging will get you eventually.
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I've always needed glasses. After 3 decades in front of the computer I now need a different pair of glasses to go outside. I can feel the grim reaper's ice breath on my neck.
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by SimonInOz ( 579741 ) on Friday June 10, 2022 @11:47PM (#62610876)
The studies on myopia indicate it is indeed related to activity. If you spend much of your growing time indoors, looking at close things, your eyes become near sighted. The actual shape of the eye changes slightly. Nothing to do with the eye muscles.
This was dramatically seen in an Inuit group that one generation had practically no myopia, but a couple of generations later, after they moved indoors, myopia was common.
I suffered serious myopia after growing up in the UK in the 1960/70s and being fairly bookish. -6.5 vision is pretty horrible, requiring thick "coke-bottle" lenses. Hard contact lenses gave excellent vision, but were very uncomfortable. Later soft lenses were more comfortable, but vison less good.
Around 50, the lens in the eye hardens, preventing the muscles from moving the focus much, this is why long sightedness is common in older adults. This happened to me too, though I certainly did not become long sighted, just had a smaller range of focus.
I eventually opted for lens replacement surgery, with a multi focus lens. The result are pretty good, allowing vison at all distances, though reading glasses are still needed sometimes. There are significant side effects and acuity is well down, due to the triple focus of the Fresnel lenses.
On the bright side, I'm part cyborg now.-
The studies on myopia indicate it is indeed related to activity. If you spend much of your growing time indoors, looking at close things, your eyes become near sighted.
This is actually borne by studies as well. It's ubiquitous in Asia because the English style education system pretty much encourages it to the extreme.
As in, three is the One Big Test(tm) that pretty much dictates your future - do you continue your education with a scholarship to an overseas (US or UK, traditionally, but generally any presti
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> The studies on myopia indicate it is indeed related to activity.. looking at close things, your eyes become near sighted
Perhaps that could be avoided if young children were to use reading glasses for reading and other close work indoors.
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In a letter to Robert Hooke, he wrote:
"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."Just find your nearest giant - problem solved!
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We stopped selecting for eyesight. Without selection, the trait is deprioritized.
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Many people only find reproductive success by seeking partners with poor eyesight.
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Evolution does not change a trait this way in the space of barely two generations. Maybe in two hundred.
Moreover, what exactly do you think is doing the "selecting?" Being nearsighted does not get you eaten by the bear in modern society.-
You're actually making my point. Since being nearsighted doesn't get you eaten by a bear in modern society, sharp vision no longer a trait that is improved over time. And this has been happening since we banded together. I do mean hundreds of generations.
It wasn't just being eaten by bears, either. It was the successful location and identification of foods that could be offloaded on others.
Might be nothing to this theory in reality... but it seems rather plausible to me.
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How could they not have seen this coming?
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It is actually possible to reverse myopia, https://endmyopia.org/ [endmyopia.org] provides many explanatory resources including a wiki https://wiki.endmyopia.org/ [endmyopia.org] with much detailed background information.
It should come as no surprise: the historically high myopia rates are obviously an adaptive response to a change in our living/working environment. It should therefore be possible to understand and invert that change and achieve the reverse adaptive response.
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More and more of its conscripts seemed to be short-sighted, meaning they needed glasses to focus on distant objects.
No it doesnâ(TM)t. It actually means that light is focused short, in front of the retina. For some people, the symptom of this is having trouble seeing further away things, but for others the need help seeing at all ranges. Conversely, long-sighted people canâ(TM)t necessarily see things clearly a long way away (at +5.5, I know this from experience)
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It's odd we can infer this but any other attempts to attribute something to a group of population is considered so taboo.
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"A paper published in 2019 concluded that each one-dioptre worsening in myopia was associated with a 67% increase in prevalence of myopic maculopathy, an untreatable condition that causes blindness."
This sentence has just scared the shit out of me. I'm heavily myopic, I'm going to recount my myopia/ocular history, hopefully someone with expertise can either chime in with some advice or someone older with worse myopia can give their experience?
All my immediate family are heavily myopic. I started wearing g
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I remember one time on the bus to uni and realizing that every East Asian person on that bus (90% of the people on the bus at that specific time), except me, was wearing glasses. Both my parents needed glasses quite young as adults, while I've never had any issues.
I spent a lot of time outside as a kid riding my bike everywhere and playing soccer and cricket, due to Australian culture.
Only now am I developing minor sight problems because of looking at screens all day. One way to mitigate is to increas
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