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Excess Time Indoors May Explain Rising Myopia Rates
Nature reports that an unexpected factor may be behind a growing epidemic of nearsightedness: time spent indoors. From the article: Because the eye grows throughout childhood, myopia generally develops in school-age children and adolescents. About one-fifth of university-aged people in East Asia now have this extreme form of myopia, and half of them are expected to develop irreversible vision loss.
This threat has prompted a rise in research to try to understand the causes of the disorder — and scientists are beginning to find answers. They are challenging old ideas that myopia is the domain of the bookish child and are instead coalescing around a new notion: that spending too long indoors is placing children at risk. “We're really trying to give this message now that children need to spend more time outside,” says Kathryn Rose, head of orthoptics at the University of Technology, Sydney.
I work in a basement 200 feet under the ground and I know it feels good to get outside once in a while.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
People with agoraphobia are so screwed.
Ezekiel 23:20
If I go outside statistics say I have a 150% probability of getting cataracts, cancer and saggy skin :/
How peculiar this myopia is.
"About one-fifth of university-aged people in East Asia now have this extreme form of myopia, and half of them are expected to develop irreversible vision loss. "
It doesn't actually say what "this extreme form" is, exactly. Presumably cut out in editing and nobody noticed that this was left stranded. There was probably a reference to so-called "high myopia", which does indeed cause people typically in their teens to go from the ordinary fully-corrected-with-glasses myopia to being much more so, with potential "myopic degeneration" of the retina. It's a mystery why this only happens to some myopes.
The figures are scaremongering. Although this has indeed been a notable public health problem for a good while - the government of Singapore has been concerned about it for over a decade - it is nonsense that 10% of student-age people will go blind from it.
I'm an ophthalmologist. I specialise in diseases of the retina.
Aberrations have appeared in my destiny prognostication engine!
So, as with many of the bodies abilities; it's just a case of use that distance vision, or lose it when your eyes adapt to shorter ranges.
Just like muscle strength, flexibility, cognitive function, etc.
For those who didn't pick up on the bit in the summary, this is not due to close work, it's most likely due to exposure to bright light:
But time engaged in indoor sports had no such protective association; and time outdoors did, whether children had played sports, attended picnics or simply read on the beach. And children who spent more time outside were not necessarily spending less time with books, screens and close work.... Close work might still have some effect, but what seemed to matter most was the eye's exposure to bright light.
If this is the case, then what we should do to reduce the myopia problem is to use brighter lights inside.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
A few years ago I worked at a desk facing a wall and I got the feeling that it wasn't good for my eyes that they never focussed on anything more than a metre away, so I put a mirror on the wall and I think this has helped my eyes.
I tilted the mirror up a little so I could stare into it whenever I wanted without making eye contact with others.
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Wrong. You can focus on the mirror, or you can focus on the distant object reflected in the mirror.
It used to be the "bookish" children who would spend all day indoors, now it's all children who spend their lives glued to a screen -- be it playstation, computer, ereader, phone... so almost all children. Part of the problem is society becoming increasingly hostile to children in public space. Parents, teachers and mass media say that children must not be allowed to go outdoors because stranger danger, and that society must be protected from children and teens who are "out on the streets". It's a collective form of insanity.
...like a painting ...like a T/v screen ...like a movie screen ... like a mirror! Quid Mojo Pro Ipso Fatso Forgotso!
They are challenging old ideas that myopia is the domain of the bookish child and are instead coalescing around a new notion: that spending too long indoors is placing children at risk.
Doesn't that amount to the same thing? Not spending much time on distance focussing?
You have not just spent too much time indoors, it has been in an echo chamber.
In my family, when we were kids we played in the street all the hours we could, right through teenage years. Our mother would take us to the park once or twice a week. As a family, we'd walk for miles, more than twenty on one particular occasion. I always loved being outdoors and still prefer it.
I had my first pair of glasses for myopia fitted when I was 12.
You're still focusing on the mirror in both cases.
No. If you are looking at objects seen in the mirror you are focussing at the total distance of : you-mirror plus mirror-object
The mirror wraps the distance but does not reduce how far the light must travel or the object appears.
At last : all those hours I spent in school physics drawing light ray diagrams has come in useful.
I've been a heavy computer user since I was 8 years old. I'm now 39 and have always had perfect vision. Wrong again, "scientists."
I'm a photographer, and this is a common false assumption. The actual focus is on whatever is in the mirror. It's exactly like seeing the same subject through clear glass.
What the fuck? How the hell is something as dumb as what "nukenerd" just wrote on Slashdot?! I know the standards here have dropped over the past few years, but what "nukenerd" wrote is abysmally dumb.
As far as the eye is concerned, the light came from the mirror. That's the last physical object to have touched the light before it entered the eye. Thus that is what the eye will focus on: the mirror.
Let me give you an example that you'll be able to relate to. "nukenerd", when you're on Folsom Street and sunlight reflects off of a glistening penis, your eyes aren't focusing on the sun, millions of miles away. Your eyes are focusing on the penis that's a few inches from your face.
Can we develop an e-book reader that presents a virtual image that must be focused on as though it were at a distance? Let a cohort of Asian kids go through childhood reading from this device and see what happens to their vision.
Stop masturbating, people.
I started noticing this when I was revising for A-Levels. (17-18)
My distance vision would start to fuzz after hours on the books, and be restored by a long walk.
It's pretty much done the same thing ever since.
One thing I do is make sure to focus on distant objects while looking out of the window a few times an hour.
The other thing that helps is wearing +1D reading glasses (just cheap ones from the supermarket). These are designed for oldies who can't focus on close objects anymore - so they move the focal point of close up material much further away. A foot or two away, my monitor is basicaly at infinity, which stops/reverses the atrophy of my distance vision.
Focussing is mediate by muscles! Like any others, use them, or lose them.
Was that Slashdot's loudest whoosh? My ears are still ringing.
So they can breath polluted air. Soon to become even more polluted due to deregulation in the US and lack of regulation elsewhere.
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It's you who is the dumbass. Perhaps you should actually think about it, or research it, before calling people out.
This is school level physics.
The mirror doesn't emit light, it reflects it. Which means the light has the same path as before, just bounced into a different angle, convergence and everything.
Try this simple experiment - hold a mirror close by so as to reflect a tree in the distance. Hold a page of text (or a glistening penis, I suppose) next to the mirror. Focus on the text. Now focus on the tree.
Can't do both at the same time, can you?
the last years, and my eye-sight has definitely changed for the worse since.
stop the tech the test ideas and have recess come back in schools.
But think of a world if it were true. You'd be able to hold up a mirror next to your face to see anything in excellent detail. What an interesting place. No more glasses, but everyone would carry portable mirrors.
How's that for myopic?
Except that left-right are swapped in the reflection.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
This is actually another false assumption. You see the right/left reversal because you are facing the other way when viewing the reflection. That's why up/down are not swapped also.
This isn't even physics. This is geometry. Light follows a straight path. Mirrors reflect it almost perfectly. Now get your laser range finder, and point it at a mirror. What happens? The range finder reports the total distance between you and the mirror + the mirror and the diffuse object it hits.
For a more accessible experiment, hold a mirror up in your face but at an angle so you can see the world behind you as well as your eyes. Your eyes are heavily crossed when focused on the dust on the mirror itself, but not so much when focused on the reflected world behind you. The position of your eyes determines what you focus on. In fact, you could determine distance by recording the angle of your eyes and using basic trig. The variables would be the distance between your eyes, and the angles of your eye positions. Laser range finders use a different method for determining distance, but the result is the same.
In my line of work, I use something called a laser scanner/LiDAR. This device is basically a laser range finder on steroids. It spins in every direction and creates a "point cloud" of the environment around it. The points in the cloud are calculated with basic trig - laser angle & distance can give you xyz coordinates and establish one point. A completed point cloud has millions of these points. If you put mirror in front of it, it'll record those points as though the mirror were a doorway into a reversed room. I have to delete these points afterwards.
Nukenerd is right, and you are wrong.
I don't think you RTFA.
You're too close to the problem. Parents are irrational and should STFU. Lets the rest of us make the decisions from now on, given that we have gotten a full nights sleep and aren't emotionally tangled up in the well being of the worst roommate imaginable.
If what you are saying is true, I would be able to stand 6 inches from the mirror here in my room, take my glasses off, and see everything in the reflection in-focus. Guess what, the reflection is just as blurry.
My optician has a rather cramped testing room. So they put the eye chart thingie (Actually a set of different charts, some illuminated) on the wall above the patients' chair. Flipped. The opposite wall has a mirror, so the effective patient-to-chart distance is almost twice the length of the room.
Try this simple experiment - hold a mirror close by so as to reflect a tree in the distance. Hold a page of text (or a glistening penis, I suppose) next to the mirror. Focus on the text. Now focus on the tree.
Can't do both at the same time, can you?
Not when there is a glistening penis distracting me.
Oh, you must be one of those 'idiots' I keep hearing about on the Internet. It's OK to be ignorant. It's not OK to wear your ignorance as a badge and hit others on the head with it.
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Or at least not wear their "normal" prescription when reading. I know for sure what happened to me. I spent plenty of time outside but I read a lot of books too. I acquired nearsightedness by about 5th grade, so of course they gave me corrective lenses to restore 20/20 vision, i.e., perfect focus at something 20 feet away. That meant that for reading, my eyes had to focus even closer than they would otherwise, in order to compensate for the glasses trying to focus farther away, so I got even more nearsighted, got stronger corrective lenses, and it just snowballed. By the time I finished college, I had corrective lenses of roughly -5.0 left and -4.0 right. Now, with no glasses, my natural, relaxed focal distance is about 4 inches in front of my face, anything farther I need glasses. I realize now what I should have done is at least take off my corrective glasses for reading and any close work.
Really.. has it come down to this SNL writers.. enough with the short jokes.
This is not a new idea. It was realised many years ago that those who spend most time outside suffer less. The theory being that they focus a lot more on far away objects.
It looks like the whoever came up with this, has not carried proper research to check whether this has been looked at before.
Ask the kids to focus on owning their own home some day.
It'll cure 'em in minutes.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
I grew up in the 50s and 60s, and I spent most of my time (when not in school) outdoors. We rarely went indoors during summer break, in fact they had to make us come back in during thunderstorms. I was nearsighted by the time I was in 4th grade and had glasses shortly after that.
As an adult I've worked outside for the past 39 years. Still nearsighted and still wear glasses.
What caused my bad vision? Certainly not too much time spent indoors, right?
Growing up as a kid - we had RECESS!!!!! We got outside in the morning before school, during RECESS!!!!!, during lunch!!!!!, during afternoon recess, and after school when we rode our bikes and big wheels all over the damn place until the street lights came on...
I needed glasses by the time I was in 7th grade because I read a lot of Hardy Boy's Mysteries by flashlight under the covers until I fell asleep... I did a lot of electronics work up close, and of course I was on all kinds of green and orange screens until the era of the PC/Mac...
Now in my late 40's I have some crazy glasses - prism in one lens because of some nerve damage caused by a couple of car accidents when I was younger (one when I was 16, one when I was in my 30's).... I'm outside a LOT in the summer when I enjoy building all kinds of stuff - sheds, etc. and mountain biking - which is pretty much what I've done my whole life.
I couldn't be outside any more unless I was a farmer, and even then I'd have to go to school as a kid right?
I know all that. Reread my post again. I'm talking about a fantasy world not a real one. I'm not the AC penis troll. I think it would make an interesting sci-fi book. I've done minor LiDAR work in an intro to robotics class.
If you were nearsighted, it wouldn't work. A (flat) mirror can't make anything appear closer. But if you were far sighted, and wanted to examine an object right in front of your face, you could whip out your handy mirror and hold it off at a distance to the side, and examine the object's reflection in the mirror. Or you could just step backwards...
I've been spending all this time indoors, and now my eyesight is around -9.00 diopters. (yes, true, and yes, that's pretty high powered myopia right there).
Of course, as a child of the '60s, I spent plenty of time outside. And it was always baffling that my eyes where so bad, because none of my parents had this bad of eyesight. Both could actually carry on without prescription lenses, unlike my daily life. Turn out, both carried the recessive gene for it, and those are the ones that I inherited.
I needed glasses when I was three and my dad was throwing baseballs back and forth with me. Not that I knew anything about that. I could read (which was why they thought I didn't need glasses), but I was always getting yelled at for sitting too close to the TV (Duh!).
This reminds me of the spam that I keep seeing talking about fixing my eyes in seven days or so. Really? The only way to fix my vision is LASIK. No exercises or eye drops is going to fix anything wrong with my vision. Maybe someday I'll go that route, but I haven't yet.
Bryan
I call "bullshit", as would my opthamologist.
Most childhood-developing myopia is a result of growth factors (The eyesocket changes size and shape as you get older and the eyeball can end up with distorted curves. Only 1-2mm variation is enough to cause issues). The predominant cause is genetic, not environmental.
Anything beyond 3 meters is close enough to "infinity" as makes no odds, so "indoors" would have to be extremely claustrophobic to even factor into this.
Bookish children tend to be myopic for the simple reason that developing myopia makes dealing with outdoor sports _hard_. Before mine was picked up I hated outdoor sports such as baseball or tennis because I simply couldn't see the ball unless it was close by. Such a problem results in kids being the "last selected" for any classroom teams and so the issue becomes self-reinforcing.
So, just to clarify, does correlation imply causation or not?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it