Half the world's population will suffer nearsightedness by 2050

Half the world's population is equivalent to about 5 billion people who will have nearsightedness by 2050 and the blindness rate of one-third of them will increase significantly if the current situation continues. That is the conclusion just published by the scientists, calling for the need for appropriate vision care measures to avoid the risk of eye diseases in the present age despite the root cause of the problem still controversial.

From the mid-1970s to the early 2000s, the number of nearsighted people in the United States has doubled and in some areas in Asia, the proportion of people infected has also increased significantly. A recent statistic conducted in Korea shows that up to 96% of young people here have myopia. In Singapore, China and Japan, the rate of myopia is about 80 to 90%.

And based on statistics over the past few decades, a group of scientists from many parts of the world have estimated the number of nearsighted people in the future. Turn over 145 studies conducted on 2.1 million people, showing that in 2000, about 1.406 billion people were identified as nearsighted (accounting for 22.9% of the world population), 163 million people had severe nearsightedness. with high risk of blindness and cataract. Since then, the research team predicted that "by 2050 there will be 4.758 billion people with myopia (accounting for about 49.8% of the world population) and 938 million people suffer from nearsightedness."

If young children spend a lot of time on outdoor activities, the attack of myopia will be significantly reduced.

Although scientists are still arguing about the exact cause of the sudden increase in the proportion of myopia, according to the estimates, by 2050, the number of people will increase 7 times compared to the year. 2000. It is often said that nearsightedness is related to the use of computer screens, phones, but in fact, things are not so simple.

The growth of nearsighted people has also been linked to changes in lifestyle and behavior that have taken place over the past decades. Researchers believe that "environmental, educational, lifestyle changes reduce outdoor activities, increase work activities at close range and many other factors that constitute this outcome." ". They think that people now spend more time indoors than at any other time in history. At the same time very few people are living without contacting every day with the screen, be it for business, study or entertainment purposes.

However, what researchers want to discover is what biological mechanism has created a drastic change in the physical structure of the human eye. Increasing the use of the screen is not good evidence to explain the problem because the number of people with myopia has increased before the explosion of the smartphone screen, but instead, it only plays a role in making the the worse is not the root cause of the problem.

In myopic vision, images will focus in front of the retina instead of focusing on the retina like an ordinary eye.

A recent report said that if young children spend a lot of time on outdoor activities, the attack of myopia will be significantly reduced. However, this is still a hypothesis and researchers have not conducted long enough trials on children to determine this. On the other hand, studies are still based on animals and the results are still uncertain when applied to humans.

However, the tracing of myopia is ultimately not urgent by finding a cure or prevention. A recent study has shown quite promising results by giving children extra time to work outdoors for at least 2 hours. According to the researchers, this may be a protective measure and explain them given that because when outdoors, the activity of looking at a long distance stimulates the retina to secrete certain substances, thereby Better eye health protection.