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More Time Outside Tied To Less Nearsightedness In Children
Bookworm09 writes: For primary school children in China, spending an extra 45 minutes per day outside in a school activity class may reduce the risk of myopia, according to a new study. In some parts of China, 90% of high school graduates have nearsightedness, and rates are lower but increasing in Europe and the Middle East, the authors write. "There were some studies suggesting the protective effect of outdoor time in the development of myopia, but most of this evidence is from cross-sectional studies (survey) data that suggest 'association' instead of causality," said lead author Dr. Mingguang He of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. "Our study, as a randomized trial, is able to prove causality and also provide the high level of evidence to inform public policy."
Its better eye exercise to be active outside, where your focal range is much greater and you are changing focal points much more often than when inside.
Came to this conclusion myself a while back due to how much time I spent in front of a computer compared to my sisters. Definitely has an effect on you.
My eye sight (and weight) starting going bad after college. I figure it was because I was spending more time sitting down and staring at a computer when I got my first desk job than before (where I used to usually sit at the computer only at home or at a class per semester).
My grandparents wear glasses, my parents wear glasses, my siblings wear glasses. I was an active kid and spent a long amount of time outside when I was in grade school. I still ended up wearing glasses before I turned 12.
This article basically confirms it, but the topic was covered extensively in the health media last year. I don't remember the study but they noted that white anglo population in England had a much higher rate of myopia than the white anglo population in Australia. Australians get a lot of sunshine, England is cursed with a lot of fog and rain. Genetics is not a factor since the two populations are virtually identical with only ~100 years separating them.
Anyways the key factors are light and focus. Bright lights (such as sunlight) = healthy eyes. Time spent with eyes focused on close objects (such as reading or computering) = myopia. Of course spending time outdoors on a sunny day leads to eyes exposed to high levels of light and focused on distant objects, while playing Gameboy indoors will lead to the opposite.
Note that this effect concerns growing children. Adults already have their eyeball shape pretty much fixed and it's rare to develop myopia in adulthood.
Anyways my point was that it's not necessarily outdoors that prevents myopia in children, it's light and focal distance. So if a child were to spend all their time indoors but the house was brightly lit and a lot of that time was spent watching a TV far away (like 6 meters or more), they won't develop myopia. Of course that's hard to do since most house lights are nowhere near bright enough to match sunlight levels, and if you're indoors it's hard to keep your eyes focused far away for extended periods.
The only reason is increased levels of focus on nearby media.
Reading, writing, drawing, computer use.
All these things have something in common: moving the eyes and having the eyes focused constantly, it exercise the muscles.
And what happens when you exercise muscles? They grow.
Remember all that eye strain you used to get? Notice it is mostly gone now?
There is no magic behind it, no lack of exposure to sunlight, no other spooky reasons. It is just overuse of the eyes muscles.
I know this because I had horribly shit vision after taking up reading when I was a kid. Went from perfect vision to being barely able to read a blackboard.
Squinting was really the only way I could read effectively, for a while.
Instead of becoming a slave to it, instead of getting glasses, I decided to just learn to read out of focus.
After doing that, my eyes were fine. They recovered just after a couple years of doing that.
I got lazy and back in to my activities that needed close focus, and regularly moving my eyes around, again, it went bad.
And again, I simply stopped doing, it recovered. This basically confirmed it. But I continued to experiment with it.
The only issues I had when learning to read out of focus was horrible hand-writing that some people had, teachers especially!
I only really learned to read your average standard text, not things with heavy slanting or connectedness.
That is why I know my eyes are fine, other than, you know, the eye tests I had as well. But I knew they recovered from that difference in text alone, I was still unable to comprehend that awful mess of text while out of focus.
I've even told others to do it, others with glasses, just to learn to read out of focus. It helped them as well.
I had a friend with horrible double vision that it helped reasonably well. (she just had surgery on her eyes.)
Now, of course, there are some cases where this will not work reverse anything.
Some people have genetic issues that lead to cramped, crushed eye sockets, or pressure behind the eyes.
But even then, learning to read out of focus can still help them, but it won't make their eyes suddenly become normal.
Just not having to wear glasses all the time will surely make things less annoying. (or worse, the worst thing humans have invented, contact lenses!)
Our eyes never evolved to deal with this facet of our modern society. It has never really been a thing that has been detrimental to the species survival either. Why would it? Most people had spat out a child by the time eye damage became an issue. It was never an issue that stopped reproduction or lead to death.
The basics behind it is just taking a passage of text, focus in one area of it, draw a circle in the middle if you want to, now write it down without moving your eyes around the passage.
You will likely make mistakes. But over time, you will eventually learn what those shapes are with higher efficiency.
Doing it upside down, mirrored, it can't hurt, it will cause your brain to make more connections and lead to a higher correct guess on what the blur might represent.
Remember, this is just small groups of passages. You are not going to realistically read a whole Slashdot post by looking in the middle of it, especially if you are on a widescreen monitor. Split it up in to discrete sections in your head.
One thing that you will also likely find is your ability to read multiple lines at once and combine them in the correct order. (it gets harder with dense wide texts, but those are always terrible anyway, short columns are better to read, always have been, always will be, it is considerably harder to lose your place in them)
Being able to read a group of sentences without moving your eyes around too much. Honestly the best thing I decided to do.
English is fairly standard, it will not help you with complex glyph sets like Asian. Too many of them look similar.
This will not improve over night. It will take a good year or two of practice, less if
and I could have kept up the self abuse without going blind
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
I have weird eyes, and among over things my near sightedness can vary wildly within a day.
I've I've been staring at a screen in a dark rook for the last two days, chances are I'll wake up unable to see 3 meters away even with my glasses, my vision a blurry mess. But then I go look at the sunny outside and focus on the inifinite for an hour or two and I'm back to normal.
What's that? They found out preventing eye strain prevents near sightedness? Call the press, they found out fucking nothing.
This has been known forever that if you relax your eyes for a period and focus to infinity (relax your eyes) will help you.
It doesn't even need to be in a bright room, as evidenced by the fact that being in permanent darkness for a week can fix eye problems in recent research.
You just need to rest your eyes if you start getting sore eyes. That is it.
Your eyes have muscles like any other body part, over-using them will lead to one thing and one thing only: growth.
Your eyes are already fairly tight as it is, there is little wiggle-room for growth.
So that just leads to your eyes getting crushed.
This visual-stimuli hypothesis is so horribly flawed it hurts.
The basis of its flawed research is that dimly lit areas will lead to people focusing more to see edges, which is only further brought on by small texts in books, computer screens and the like. So this means they aren't considering a major facet that leads to the problem.
Do the same research with people in brightly lit rooms and watch that evidence evaporate in to nothing.
More modern schools have white or near-white lighting over horrible incandescents and other things like that. And lots of windows exposed to light.
Now we play the waiting game and see if these kids develop crappy eyes.
The lack of rest and variable focus leads to the problem. A lot of things in our modern lives restrict our eyes to very narrow viewing angles and focal ranges.
That's it. That is the only reason. It leads to improper eye development.
And as I mentioned, a lot of eye issues could be fixed by "resetting" them through that dark room experiment. (which they never used a blindfold for, they actually had a dark room... )
For hundreds of years mothers and grandmothers have been saying too much time spent indoors reading and not enough time outside causes eyeball problems. That along with the idea of not sleeping with a night light on. Along come uber edumicated scientists saying there is no scientific evidence showing this the case. the so called experts called the moms and grandmas every un politically correct name under the sun. now come this study showing they were correct all along. the story is not over though. I know for a certainty that in another few months another study will come out ontradicting this study. This is everything wrong with science. Supposedly the hallmark of scientific reasoning is repeatability. By your own standards science is not correct and should be looked at in the same vein as religion. I am for one willing to believe all the old wives tales, or at least the ones that seems to make sense e.g. masterbatoon leads to blindness, and the current vaccination practices cause autism. If scientist want to convince the public of something, they should provide evidence. By evidence I do not mean a scientific study. I can prove scientifically through studies anything under the sun. I just need some money to hire t right people to do the right kind of science. We need scientist to come up with reasons the body works the way it does. Like why not figure out what actually does cause autism. Or maybe figure out what causes lung cancer. The current group of scientist are only able to say things like smoking causes lung cancer and ignore wall the smokers who do not have lung cancer and the nonsmokers who get cancer.
Hey guys did you know that mouth wash cases bad breadth. I did a scientific study and found tre is a statistically significant correlation between halitosis and mouthwash. Time to start thinking and stop believing in science. Listen to the so called experts, but realize they are at best fallible and at worst trying to sell u something. make up your own mind
In other words, the smartness gene causes both nearsightedness and a decreased desire to play outside.
...that if you spend all your time as a kid never focussing on anything more than six feet away, you'll most likely wind up near sighted.
Are you telling me that all those times my mom yelled, "Don't sit so close to the TV, you'll ruin your eyes!" she was right?
You are welcome on my lawn.
That is what my daugher's optometrist reckons, lots more myopia since they became popular. For get looking six feet away, IPads are often one foot away. Much closer than a computer monitor. Spend 8 hours a day looking at it and there are bound to be problems. (Of which myopia might be the least important!)
From here:
In 2009, Regan Ashby, Arne Ohlendorf and Frank Schaeffel from the University of Tubingen's Institute for Ophthalmic Research in Germany showed that high illumination levels - comparable to those encountered outside - slowed the development of experimentally induced myopia in chicks by about 60% compared with normal indoor lighting conditions
The leading hypothesis is that light stimulates the release of dopamine in the retina, and this neurotransmitter in turn blocks the elongation of the eye during development. The best evidence for the 'light-dopamine' hypothesis comes - again - from chicks. In 2010, Ashby and Schaeffel showed that injecting a dopamine-inhibiting drug called spiperone into chicks' eyes could abolish the protective effect of bright light
I seem to remember the US Navy did such studies back in the 70s... on the crew of submarines.
They kept failing an eye test... The reference I find is for a study in the mid 50s:
https://books.google.com/books?id=q1rU41-ekOIC&pg=PR11&lpg=PR11&dq=US+Navy+studies+on+myopia&source=bl&ots=KxZje4LIVc&sig=0NF8_F-VeaUBaHqT90iyb98ITms&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMI7_OGx-P8xwIVCtIeCh0cRw-K#v=onepage&q=US%20Navy%20studies%20on%20myopia&f=false
And http://www.myopia.org/page2.htm (look for reference to "submarine personnel"
Basic result - they spent too much time inside with short focal length, causing the eye to adjust...
And more likely to get cataracts later in life.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
... when I was one or so -- because my mother war a bit paranoid, as she had had lots of eye trouble as an infant and I was child no. 1/ The doctor looked at my eyes and told her I had almost perfect vision -- which was actually bad, because it is normal for young children to be far-sighted. One's eyeball gets longer as one gets older, so while "normal" kids eyes would go from far-sighted to normal, my eyesight was fated to go from normal to VERY near-sighted. He was right.
Credo quia impossibilis -- Tertullian
Every single person on both sides of my family wears glasses. Both my parents, my brother, 20 or so cousins, and all aunts and uncles and grandparents wear glasses. I have 20/15+ vision that far exceeds normal vision. For example I can read a Burger King menu from the play center. How do I explain it? I was always focused at a static depth so how could my lenses or whatever have warped? I did go outside a lot but percentage-wise, it was TV and computers.
Though I'm told staying up half the night reading Analog and not having my eyes equidistant from the pages is what doomed them.