Scientific explanation for people with nearsightedness

Myopia is one of our most common troubles, but do we basically misunderstand the cause and treatment of myopia?

The cause of people being nearsighted

When we were teenagers, our eyesight was weak and many people had to wear glasses. Many people ask the eye doctor while he looks at the blurry images on the optometrist. The answers of doctors are always the same: It's because of genes and reading, using computers too much.

We have no reason to wonder, anyone's eye doctor will say so if you go to myopia. However, recent studies suggest that these hypotheses are completely wrong. Accordingly, many other problems in the modern life environment can cause vision loss. And with just a few simple measures, children today can avoid the aforementioned visual impairment.Either way, many people have never said that the idea of ​​visual acuity is primarily due to genetics.

Without glasses many people really can't distinguish a rock from a rhino. So will our ancestors be blinded by narrowing their eyes to find their way through the African desert? But myopia is like a plague, about 30 to 40% of Europeans and Americans need glasses, and the number is up to 90% in some Asian countries. If we have myopia, we have had it for millennia regardless of whether it is clearly detrimental.

In fact, the experiences of the Inuit in Canada may have answered that question almost 50 years ago. While older people have almost no nearsightedness, about 10 to 20% of their children must wear glasses.'It is never possible to say myopia is genetic disease , ' said Nina Jacobsen of Glostrup University Hospital in Copenhagen. At the same time, the Inuit began to abandon the hunting and fishing lifestyle to move to a more Western lifestyle, most likely the cause of vision loss.

'Myopia is a disease of the industrial age ,' said Ian Flitcroft at Children's University Hospital in Dublin. Our ene G may still play a role in deciding who will be nearsighted , but it is only through changes in the environment in which the disease begins to appear. Part of that change is learning and reading, which is one of the most common explanations for myopia.

At first the evidence seems obvious: just see the countless gleaming glasses at any university, presentation, theater or academic conference, you see it seems to have found see evidence of the link. Yet epidemiological studies show that the impact is much smaller than we thought.'The more we study it and the more people read it, the more it will disappear ,' Flitcroft said.

A large-scale study that tracks the progress of children in Ohio shows that there is no correlation with reading, although we should not completely eliminate this effect, Jacobsen said. Instead of this idea, many people now argue that it is time to stay indoors, not the nature of reading, which is the deciding factor.After many studies, from Europe, Australia and Asia, everyone has found that people who have a lot of time outdoors are much less nearsighted than those who live mainly in four walls. .

Why is this possible? The most accepted explanation is that sunlight has somehow nourished the eyes . For example, Mr. Scott Read of Queensland University of Technology has equipped a group of students with a special watch that records students' comprehensive movement and light intensity, every 30 seconds, in within two weeks. Students with good eyesight turned out to be not more active than students wearing glasses, thus eliminating the possibility that limb training and good health have protected the eyes.

Instead, wearing glasses or not seems to depend only on the time spent outdoors. Sunlight when sunlight can be thousands of times more intense than light in the house (although your eyes do not notice the difference), and children who enjoy more sunlight then they less need to use glasses.
Probably because sunlight stimulates the production of Vitamin D, which helps protect the immune system and the brain, and can also regulate eye health. A more accepted opinion is that sunlight activates the release of dopamine directly into the eye. Myopia is due to the larger growth of the eyeball, which makes it difficult for the lens to focus more than one image into the retina, but dopamine seems to inhibit this enlargement and cause eyeballs to have size. healthier ruler .

Another problem, may be the color problem. The wavelength of green and blue light tends to focus in front of the retina, while red light shines on the back. Because light in the home tends to be redder than the sun's rays, the above mismatch can confuse the eye-bridge control mechanisms.'It makes the eye think that it has not converged in the right place and therefore the right eye is enlarged to compensate for that mistake, ' said Chi Luu of the University of Melbourne.

He observed that chickens waking up at red light are more likely to be nearsighted than chickens in the vicinity of green and blue. Meanwhile, Flitcroft thinks the problem is in arranging objects in front of your vision. Look around you and you'll understand what he wants to say.'If you look at the laptop screen, everything behind the screen is out of focus , ' he said, 'And if you look up, look from the laptop to the wall clock, you have a step. Large conversions, this time the clock is in focus, and it causes many objects around you to fade. '

Regardless of where you focus on, there is always a faintness with the eye feedback mechanism. When outdoors, objects tend to be farther away, it gives a clearer image and helps regulate eye development. Hopefully, such insights are not only of academic importance because they can ultimately help us find new treatments. For example, Mr. Luu is hoping to develop a green light test for nearsighted children. Mr. Luu not only hopes it slows down vision loss; In fact it can reverse the process. When studying chickens, he found that a few hours of green light cured the damage caused by red light and restored the normal sight of chickens.

Flitcroft points out that there have been experiments with encouraging results on contact lenses that can reduce blur in the focus area. He is also optimistic about a positive eye drops, atropine. This medicine has long been known to help slow the signs that stimulate eye and eye growth and myopia. Its bad side effects such as dilating pupils and creating halo around the light source, so it has not been used anymore.

But with the recent random discovery, it was found that the drug still had the same effect if we only used it with 1/100 of the initial dose. With this small dose, the side effects will be much reduced, making this eye drops now of interest. However, Mr. Flitcroft stressed that we should be cautious, do not rush to act immediately.

One of the misconceptions is that it is the glasses that make the eyes worse, but the evidence that the advice should be removed. Each person's own experience will show that these are unfortunate false inferences, stemming from a controversial William Bates magazine entitled 'Better eyesight without glasses'. Many people have decided not to use glasses in the hope that the disease will go away; but instead, their nearsightedness has doubled in three years.

'A common concern is that the glass is making the disease worse, but the answer to it is no,' Flitcroft said, 'If you are definitely making your children see clearly then you do it right '. For those who wish to act now, most researchers agree that encouraging children to play outdoors is not harmful, and an experiment in Taiwanese schools has shown that quite successful. 'Living in a natural outdoor environment, people will not be nearsighted , ' Flitcroft added, 'Encouraging children to spend a lot of time outdoors only works well.'

Many elderly people will know all of these things when they were young people. Now old men and old women always wear contact lenses, it completely corrects their eyesight, and the occasional dryness of eyes and itching is a small affair.But when we wake up and can't even recognize our partner, we can't help but hope that future generations will enjoy a crystal-like image that has had time to dense. The birthright of our ancestors.