Short-sightedness is reaching epidemic proportions. Some scientists think they have found a reason w

[AngryAmish]

http://www.nature.com/news/the-myopia-boom-1.17120

"East Asia has been gripped by an unprecedented rise in myopia, also known as short-sightedness. Sixty years ago, 10–20% of the Chinese population was short-sighted. Today, up to 90% of teenagers and young adults are. In Seoul, a whopping 96.5% of 19-year-old men are short-sighted.

Other parts of the world have also seen a dramatic increase in the condition, which now affects around half of young adults in the United States and Europe — double the prevalence of half a century ago. By some estimates, one-third of the world's population — 2.5 billion people — could be affected by short-sightedness by the end of this decade. “We are going down the path of having a myopia epidemic,” says Padmaja Sankaridurg, head of the myopia programme at the Brien Holden Vision Institute in Sydney, Australia."

snip

"Attractive though the idea was, it did not hold up. In the early 2000s, when researchers started to look at specific behaviours, such as books read per week or hours spent reading or using a computer, none seemed to be a major contributor to myopia risk5. But another factor did. In 2007, Donald Mutti and his colleagues at the Ohio State University College of Optometry in Columbus reported the results of a study that tracked more than 500 eight- and nine-year-olds in California who started out with healthy vision6. The team examined how the children spent their days, and “sort of as an afterthought at the time, we asked about sports and outdoorsy stuff”, says Mutti.

It was a good thing they did. After five years, one in five of the children had developed myopia, and the only environmental factor that was strongly associated with risk was time spent outdoors6. “We thought it was an odd finding,” recalls Mutti, “but it just kept coming up as we did the analyses.” A year later, Rose and her colleagues arrived at much the same conclusion in Australia7. After studying more than 4,000 children at Sydney primary and secondary schools for three years, they found that children who spent less time outside were at greater risk of developing myopia."

get your kids outside.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

1. More importantly, don't let them move back into your basement

after they graduate. Treat them just like GOP teaBaggers want to treat the rest of us. That'll teach em about the reel whirled.

[surrealAmerican]

2. This was not what I expected at all.

Short-sightedness is not considering the future - this is about near-sightedness. I hadn't realized that the incidence of near-sightedness had been changing.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

11. honestly, with that title line, I was expecting something from The Onion ... NEAR sightedness

is the correct term, is it not? or have times/terminology changed?

[ND-Dem]

12. Supposedly short-sighted is a british useage. I've never heard it either.

http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/short-sightedness/Pages/Introduction.aspx

[Tuesday Afternoon]

14. okay. thanks. Learn something every day, Momma said. and that is why I come to DU :-)

[Voice for Peace]

31. me too! I was expecting an article about environmental influence on people's inability to

think beyond their own immediate situation.

[NCjack]

3. "less time outside" -- probably the sum of all indoor activities, such as watching TV, playing

video games, reading, cooking frozen pizza, etc.

[tularetom]

4. Oh boy now they can sit outside and stare at a tiny smart phone screen as they text each other

Maybe those scientists had the whole thing bassackwards and the myopia was the cause rather than the effect. A kid who can't see WTF is doing, can't see a ball coming at his head for example, is likely to feel more comfortable indoors. So the myopic kids would gravitate toward indoor activities.

I agree that it's far better for kids to spend time outside, but if you to keep their vision as good as it can be, take the electronical toys away from them at least during the daylight hours.

[jeff47]

21. Except the studies specifically disprove that. (nt)

[Fred Sanders]

5. Arthur C. Clarke thought technology and capitalism would bring us a Hilton sponsored space station, instead it brought us Facebook.

[Orrex]

7. On the plus side, at least it didn't bring us a Hilton-sponsored space station.

[Fred Sanders]

9. I'd take it......replace Facebook.

[Orrex]

10. Hey, maybe we agree on something after all!

[Kalidurga]

6. Oh I thought this was another article about Republicans

and how they can't seem to understand sometimes you have to spend money on things like infrastructure.

[GoCubsGo]

17. Yeah, me, too.

That wasn't the kind of "short-sightedness" I was thinking of when I first saw the subject line.

[ErikJ]

24. Or how they believe the earth was created in 6 days and ..

the earth is only 6000 yrs old.

[HuckleB]

8. K & R!

[hunter]

13. There may be an evolutionary advantage to this.

As any middle aged person knows, the lenses of our eyes become less able to change focus. That's when our reading glasses, bifocals, or trifocals become indispensable.

So let's say you're a prehistoric human and you spend your early years outdoors hunting and gathering, and you become a very excellent hunter-gatherer. It would suck if your eyes froze up in a nearsighted state. On the other hand let's say you grow up sitting in the shade making very fine tools, clothing, and other necessities. It would suck if your eyes froze up with normal distance vision but you couldn't clearly see what you were making.

That all changed of course when glasses were invented.

[ananda]

15. I think it's using the eyes for closeup work..

.. like reading or electronic devices.

[jeff47]

19. And the studies specifically disprove that. (nt)

[tclambert]

16. I thought it was gonna be an Onion piece about politicians only looking ahead one election cycle

and businesspeople only looking ahead to the next quarterly statement. They would conclude that's why we have no hope to deal with climate change. If it is a problem that takes more than 5 years to mature, our leaders cannot see it. And it explains why voters might allow Republicans to run the country again. They just can't see back into history far enough to remember how bad George W. fouled it all up.

[BlancheSplanchnik]

18. hmmm...I'm gonna do a one-person experiment.

When I was a kid, I was outdoors a lot. Great eyesight.

In jr high and highschool and then college, I was indoors mostly due to a variety of factors.

That became a lifelong habit. And I get more near sighted every year.

I wonder........ Hrrmmmmm.......

[GusBob]

20. This article is so full of shit I dont know where to start

The first 2 paragraphs are so full of in accuracies I laughed out loud.

News Flash Folks: The sentence that begins "By some estimates......" that has been long held statistic along time ( and directly contradicts the numbers in the first paragraph) Roughly 30% of the world is nearsighted

You can argue nature of nurture, but the "vision therapists" who came up with this bullcrap in the 70's have long since been discredited. Think of "vision therapy" as woo for eyecare.

By all means, have your child spend time outdoors, am all for it. But I think there are other studies that have shown myopic children have higher IQ's . Now why would that be? Because smarter/ introspective kids would rather be reading than climbing trees.

Also other studies have shown, myopia runs in families....if one parent has it chances are 50 % of the kids will have it. If both parents have it....the odds increase to greater than 75% Whether they are playing hopscotch outside or not

[SheilaT]

22. I know my personal history

doesn't prove or refute anything, but I was sufficiently nearsighted my first grade that I couldn't see the blackboard. That's when I got my first glasses. And I was born in 1948. We didn't get a TV before I started school, meaning I spent much of my early childhood outside, doing outside things.

I'm one of six kids. We are all nearsighted, as were our parents.

[Sienna86]

23. I believe sun /vitamin D is more important than we currently know

Thanks for sharing this interesting article.

[ErikJ]

25. Interesting. I was the only one of 8 kids that wasnt near-sighted and I

was the only one who didnt drink Coke and soft drinks which I hated. But I also loved to play outdoors more than the others. So maybe this theory is right.

[Arugula Latte]

26. I spent a ton of time outside as a child but I became very, very nearsighted.

My dad was, too.

Lasik finally spared me, though!

[tblue37]

28. My kids (both in their mid-thirties now) were both extremely nearsighted. My daughter was legally blind without

her glasses or contacts, and my son was nearly so. Both had LASIK and both ended up with perfect vision. They LOVE their LASIK eyesight.

I am extremely farsighted, but my ex-husband is very, very nearsighted, and they inherited his vision, not mine. BTW, they both spent (and still spend) huge amounts of time running around outside--as well as huge amounts of time reading and writing.

Although my own father was also farsighted, Mom was quite nearsighted. I am the only one of their six kids who ended up farsighted. All the rest are nearsighted.

Genetics.

I imagine that nearsightedness was a real disadvantage in societies in which distance vision mattered a lot for most people, but close-up work like reading and writing did not. Nowadays, though, being able to see far off to the horizon is not as necessary for survival. Besides, now nearsighted people can correct their weak vision with spectacles or contacts, so nearsighted people survive and reproduce much more successfully than in the past, thus passing along their genes.

[Arugula Latte]

29. I've thought about that, too. There probably were few nearsighted cavepeople who

lived to a ripe old age, or even to an age where they could reproduce.

If you can't see the bear or the cougar coming for you, you can't see the poisonous snake you're about to surprise, you can't see you're going to step on a rotten log or a loose rock and be swept into the river, you can't see enough to find berries or a small animal to eat ... you're gonna die.

[tblue37]

30. And you can't spot or track an animal to hunt--or hit the side of a bison when you get near enough to

it to throw a spear.

Before writing was invented, the need for close work was limited, and even then, until a couple of hundred years ago, most people still didn't read or write--or have any reason to do so. Reading and writing was the business of a professional scribe/clerk class.

Even those who did close work unrelated to literacy--like tailors--were relatively few compared to those who did work that required being able to see some distance beyond the end of their nose.

[Hekate]

34. Like you and arugula, I've given a lot of thought to the ramifications of being a severe myope

It runs in my family too, and is definitely genetic. Early on it occurred to me how lucky we all were to have been born in the 20th century and not a couple of centuries earlier. What sort of occupation could any of us have had absent corrective lenses?

I got my kids into hard contact lenses at an early age, and they never experienced anywhere near the full severity that my father, my sibs, and myself did. In their early 20s they got LASIK and talked me into it as well. What an incredible difference.

But the genes go on: my grandson has been wearing glasses since he was 8, about average for my family.

[valerief]

27. Can we get Congress outdoors, too? nt

[Not a Fan]

32. Macular degeneration

... has also been closely linked to Vitamin D3 deficiency.

Do a search on "Vitamin D3 and Macular Degeneration"- there's significant information on this available.

Obviously the resident science deniers won't be interested - as well as those who have poor reading skills (those medical studies can be tough going for them.)

[Warren DeMontague]

33. Naaaaaaaaaaaaaah. It's cuz we're smarter.

That big brain smooshes down on the eyeballs. Simple physiology.

Judging by my eyeglass prescription, I'm a fucking mentat.