Apparently, our eyes adjust so quickly to the difference that we have a very poor sense of the magnitude of light change between indoors and outdoors.
I bring this up because one of the largest factors in myopia development appears to be outdoor light exposure in childhood.
Genetics are likely a factor too, but light exposure seems to have a huge effect:
"The prevalence of myopia in 6- and 7-year-old children of Chinese ethnicity was significantly lower in Sydney (3.3%) than in Singapore (29.1%), while patterns of daily outdoor light exposure showed that children living in Singapore were exposed to significantly less daily outdoor light than Australian children." (from the same study linked above)
The obvious takeaway for parents, schools, and governments: ensure your children have plenty of outdoor playtime. It will greatly reduce instances of myopia (not to mention the benefits from higher Vitamin D levels, exercise, etc).
I've read this study a while ago, and I think it helped me correct my son's myopia.
When my 5yo kid's eye check came back with "he'll need glasses next year", we started strict "hour+ outside play daily" policy. At his next checkup, he had normal vision. Dr was surprised.
I believe that's still under active research. If this is a factor, my money is more on "your eyes will be focusing more at infinity" rather then low light levels.
> 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 risk
> Rose's team tried to eliminate any other explanations for this link — for example, that children outdoors were engaged in more physical activity and that this was having the beneficial effect. 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 ... what seemed to matter most was the eye's exposure to bright light.
if your child loves watching tv, bring the ipad to the park and make her watch it outside.
> if your child loves watching tv, bring the ipad to the park and make her watch it outside.
I was in agreement until this.
Doesn't this defeat the purpose of being outside? To actually use their eyes to see things near and far, run about and get those muscles working? I don't know what it is about modern parenting that seems wholeheartedly dedicated to the task of making children worship at the altar of Disney and Youtube while denying any chance of developing mental and physical toughness.
The whole point of the comment is that time outside matters more than what is done outside. I don't know the degree to which this is true but if you're going to watch something anyway, doing it outside instead of inside seems like not a bad plan. I don't think they intended anything by specifying tv and you could replace it with reading, board games, drawing, any activity commonly done inside.
Glass absorbs a huge chunk of the spectrum, both UV and visible. Without studying the actual difference, it is risky to assume that the effect would be similar.
Focusing on infinity more has been tested using glasses designed to force this, it was a popular theory for 60 years or so, and many opticians prescribed glasses which forced people to do this as a result. I cant find it atm, but the result according to a large metastudy was that it caused headaches, and nothing else of note.
Wow in what country do you live in? I have NEVER in my live even have an optician hint at that. The best I got so far was slow understanding of why I am ordering glasses to focus the screen at infinity (one out of 10). All others stare blankly at me and say like "Uh that's illegal, we can give out glasses that potentially ruin your eyes". Well I kept thinking, "Yeah, that's just what you are doing all day" :D
Sweden,
Third optician I had did it did it and explained "why", including pointing that the last one also did it according to their logs. Both over adjusting by 0.75, explaining why the first year with each pair gave me a headache. I looked into the causes of nearsightedness afterwards, including the focus nearby/read too much myth, as well I definitely read enough. So was prepared to stop the next optician. But she just called the earlier ones idiots when I mentioned it. Terminal glasses worked well for me.
I don't know which it is or if multiple other factors are involved, but if you look at the structure of an eye, there are tissues which compose the iris which are connected to the adjacent tissue of where the lens is nestled. It's quite possible to me that increased use of the iris outdoors to close down and reduce light entering the eye could affect the "dynamic range" of the lens response to focal inputs - especially during the growth stages of kids.
Then you would expect darker regions of the world which have lower serum levels of vitamin D to have more sight problems, I don’t think that’s the case.
I’d actually look at the vision of people with dark skin who now reside in northern latitudes. Typically that is the most vitamin D deficient population, since their melanin levels are tuned for more intense sunlight than their current location provides.
People who have the hobby of photography, might have some intuitive understanding of this brightness difference. If you are shooting with fixed aperture and ISO, your exposure times could easily go from 1/60 indoors to 1/3000 outdoors which is not quite a 100X difference, but close.
Not just the difference between indoor and outdoor light, but also the incredible variations between a sunny day in the summer and a cloudy day in winter. There's a pretty incredible difference.
As are most human senses! Definitely hearing, vision, and smell; possibly also perception of force and weight, though the evidence is conflicting there.
An anecdote for this: I got a heavy carbon steel pan for Christmas that I wished for. I didn’t expect it to be in the big box I got because it seemed to be too lightweight.
At a given level of adaptation the relation between luminance and perceived lightness is closer to a square root.
But over the course of about 30 minutes there are several different kinds of adaptations (some faster than that) which the eye/brain can make to the current light level, which has an effect of shifting that curve up or down by up to several orders of magnitude.
> I bring this up because one of the largest factors in myopia development appears to be outdoor light exposure in childhood.
I used to live almost on the equator. Before adolescence, I would spent most of my time outdoors. Very stable weather so windows were open most of the day (and night). There was often direct sunlight even indoors. We would go to the beach every weekend.
I ended up with -5.00 and -5.25
Maybe this would decrease the prevalence, if you are looking at the entire population. But it's not like you, as an individual, will be immune if you just stay outside.
That's only correlation, light brightness has nothing to do with myopia. It's more likely from looking at things farther away from the face outside so that there is less light focused on the fovea.
"light brightness has nothing to do with myopia" - that's a big claim and will need some evidence to back it up, especially given the many studies that suggest otherwise.
This is still a topic with many unknowns, but we have to follow the evidence as much as we can. Evidence should always beat data-free guesses.
See my other replies. I also feel worried reading this, because it doesn't look like you've researched the subject, and I always worry about lack of understanding of myopia progression with people just talking about a subject they aren't familiar with.
kind of, kind of not. To the extent that brightness contracts your pupil, and the depth of field available to your eye increases with smaller pupil size[1]. People with focus issues find they can always focus when the light is bright enough (assuming normally functioning pupils).
So there are optical properties that are affected by bright light, and your eyes respond to that. What the mechanism is for affecting overall focus range of your eye? I would agree that is unstated/unknown.
[1] Which, as a science project, is fun to demonstrate that a pin hole camera doesn't need a lens for this reason.
Your reply is a good example. I haven't seen anyone in this HN post's comments talk about how myopia works. I legitimately do not understand why so few people know even the basics of myopia progression. All of these comments are, pun intended, the blind leading the blind. I especially don't understand it given how common myopia is and how important it is for parents to understand it for their children.
> What’s supposed to happen as your eye grows, is that things should begin to go out of focus in the periphery of your vision. That’s a signal for the eyes to stop growing.
> Applying atropine eye drops dilates the pupils and temporarily paralyzes the focusing muscle inside the eye. It also relaxes the eyes’ focusing mechanisms.
Your eye grows without your brain's involvement. Sharp focus on the back of the eye, especially in the periphery, tells the eye to grow longer because it's overfocusing. This leads to the worsening of myopia. Things that cause sharp focus on the retina and fovea: contacts, glasses, and holding things close to your face that keep everything in focus. This may be why being outside is correlated with slowing myopia progression, because you wont have things constantly in focus in your peripheral vision from it being close to you.
I have a serious question: did you not come across any of this research? No one seems to have familiarity with these concepts in this HN thread. Did you see articles like these and skip over them? Or, maybe, were you only googling for myopia and sunlight, which is unlikely to return results like these?
>The development of chicks towards emmetropization was observed at various levels of illumination: (10.000 Lux, 500 Lux and 50 Lux). Result: After 90 days 50 Lux resulted in a mean myopia of –2.41 D, 500 Lux resulted in +0.03 D, and 10.000 Lux resulted in hyperopia of
+1.1 D.
>"Categorized according to their objectively measured average daily light exposure and adjusting for potential confounders (age, sex, baseline axial length, parental myopia, nearwork, and physical activity), children experiencing low average daily light exposure (mean daily light exposure: 459 ± 117 lux, annual eye growth: 0.13 mm/y) exhibited significantly greater eye growth than children experiencing moderate (842 ± 109 lux, 0.060 mm/y), and high (1455 ± 317 lux, 0.065 mm/y) average daily light exposure levels."
>for myopic children 6 to 12 years old a mean progression of – 0.35 D in winter and –0.14 D in summer. This was attributed to the children's extended time spent outdoors in summer
Getting more sunlight is the most helpful thing one can do without special equipment
>I have a serious question: did you not come across any of this research?
I hadn't seen the more recent developments on these preventative glasses, no. However I don't tend to give too much credence to individual studies especially when reported through mainstream media. You see such studies and articles supporting all kinds of contradictory conclusions all the time.
Wikipedia isn't a reliable source, but it is kind of useful as a quick overview of current ideas on a topic. Skimming the article,
>The near work hypothesis, also referred to as the "use-abuse theory" states that spending time involved in near work strains the intraocular and extraocular muscles. Some studies support the hypothesis, while other studies do not.[3] While an association is present, it is not clearly causal.[3]
and
>There is preliminary evidence that the protective effect of outdoor activities on the development of myopia is due, at least in part, to the effect of long hours of exposure to daylight on the production and the release of retinal dopamine.[15][29][30][31]
So, immediately it seems like we aren't so certain as you suggest we are what the cause of myopia is. And your assertion that "..exposure to light brightness has nothing to do with myopia" is directly contradicted here. And from a cited recent (2019) review paper [1]
> Huang et al. highlighted, in a recent systematic review and meta-analysis, that near-work activities were related with higher odds of myopia (odds ratio 1.14; 95% CI 1.08–1.20) and that the odds of myopia increased by 2% (OR: 1.02; 95% CI 1.01–1.03) for every one diopter-hour more of weekly near work [110].
> In contrast, there are studies reporting that near work is not associated with faster rates of myopia progression [85, 111–113].
> Therefore the relationship between near work and myopia is complex and needs to be investigated.
> On the other hand, several recent epidemiological studies suggest that greater time spent outdoors might have a protective effect against myopia development and progression [114–116].
So, though I am far from being an expert after reading these few articles, they all seem to strongly contradict your assertion that "It's not unknown", and also that the research all agrees with your points.
> The near work hypothesis, also referred to as the "use-abuse theory" states that spending time involved in near work strains the intraocular and extraocular muscles.
Goodness Wikipedia, this isn't the theory at all. It has nothing to do with muscle strain. We know for a fact that in youth, the eyeball grows longer when it's overfocusing (especially in fovea), and stops growing when things are blurry. That's how it maintain focus as you grow and age. This isn't a theory, it's how the eye works. There are already multiple types of technology that successfully slow and stop myopia based on this principle, as listed in my post.
The mechanism of outdoor light is just a hypothesis without known direct link. It may be related but there's no direct evidence for it yet.
> Correlation does not imply causation but it does imply having something to do with the other
Correlation does not imply having something to do with another.
For example, in the first decade of the 21st century, spending on space exploration had a 99.8% correlation with a specific subset of suicides (hanging?).
"Correlation does not imply having something to do with another."
By its very definition, "correlation" means exactly "a mutual relation": https://www.dictionary.com/browse/correlation
The example you're giving is called coincidence not correlation. There are times where words' etymologies loose their connection with their current meaning, but that is not the case here, where we have "con" meaning "together" + "relation", which is a logical construction agreeing with word's meaning.
It depends on what you mean by "having something to do with the other" but I see what you mean. I should've assumed the more favorable interpretation of the comment I was replying to. Reminds me of the pirates and global warming correlation.
That's a pretty low amount of light, though. The sun doesn't even have to be above the horizon - Twilight, in different darknesses, exists. And you'll still be looking at things a bit further and the light isn't as concentrated.
The amount of detail sometimes varies, but then again, fog will do that especially when it is bright.
When I tried to inject fake daylight into my basement office, I realised just how "special" daylight is. It comes in from everywhere. Flood fills with so much light as such a broad spectrum.
You might be interested in this video too. There’s more to it than just the color, sunlight’s rays are (virtually) parallel, because the light source is so far away. https://youtu.be/6bqBsHSwPgw
I always thought my myopia was caused by computer usage. Reading this it sounds more likely that it was growing up in Calgary, Canada and spending huge amounts of time indoors and in basements.
It's not possible to know what caused my myopia - all I can do is guess based on the current evidence around the subject. Which is not as conclusive as you seem to think - the jury is still out on this subject.
I made an appointment with a local dermatologist about some sunburn that never seems to heal up. He's a young German guy living here in New Zealand. After a quick examination: "So! You have solar keratosis! How long have you been wearing the hat?" Me: "Oh 5 years or so". Him: "And how long have you lived here?" Me: "All my life, 60 years". Him: "Just so! It seems all Kiwis have solar keratosis ja?".
In other words, there are downsides to being outside in that 1000 times (maybe 10000 times here) brightness. The really annoying thing is that my eyes were buggered from a young age too, despite all that brightness.
> Genetics are likely a factor too, but light exposure seems to have a huge effect: "The prevalence of myopia in 6- and 7-year-old children of Chinese ethnicity was significantly lower in Sydney (3.3%) than in Singapore (29.1%), while patterns of daily outdoor light exposure showed that children living in Singapore were exposed to significantly less daily outdoor light than Australian children."
So, it's not even an individual correlation but a population-frequency-correlation between populations in different physical environments, which is so even more likely than an individual correlation to represent an effect other than causation in either direction, such as any other environmental (or population-genetic-distribution) difference.
Just as a side note, its not that people are terrible at perceiving brightness, it's just that brightness perception (like loudness) is logarithmic. So if a person says it is 2x brighter outside, and a linear measurement instrument says it is 100x brighter, that is in fact roughly consistent.
The study was done in Singapore and Malaysia. It looks like an interesting study to do in different regions of the world. e.g Western Europe where it is notably cloudier than Singapore.
I noticed that when I started to measure the lightning in a room for home automation purposes.
It is really, really difficult to find the right spot that reflects "the light in the room" and then to find a threshold to switch on the lights "at the moment I would have done that".
I constantly hesitate between 30 and 100 lx, it is so dependent on the subjective light outside.
I remember reading a post on here about someone's home office lighting setup which had some insane number of lumens and was equivalent to being outdoors at dusk. That's when I became aware of the huge difference in illumination.
Before you change your internal mental calibration, this of course changes based on latitude and time. The difference between daylight and a cloudy day midwinter in Northern Europe is probably not going to be 100x.
Off on a complete tangent here, only remotely related.
Yo, fellow four-eyed geeks.
I noticed that when lying down and looking up in a room with a light source, with my glasses on, if there is a small droplet of water on the lens (say, due to having just cleaned the glasses and not wicked up every last drop), this droplet can bend the light in such a way that when it subsequently hits the cornea and pupa, a perfectly straight, parallel beam of light passes through the vitreous humor right to the retina.
The consequence of this is that all the junk floating in your eye is rendered in "4K clarity" in a circle of light, regardless of whether it is next to the retina, or floating somewhere in the middle.
Imperfections in your cornea or elsewhere are also rendered, making themselves evident.
Damn! Thought I was the only person who ever experienced this, it's cool that you decided to post this here. Anyway, I can actually do this with my glasses off as well. Lay on your back and stare up at the light with your eyes nearest to closed as possible but still letting in a little light, it takes some adjusting to get it into focus but you get the full 4k experience just as you describe. Thanks for sharing.
ok I've always wanted to map it out and keep track of them, I swear they come and go, so going to try this out later! If you can shed more details that'd be awesome! Does the droplet have to be dead centre??
The droplet doesn't have to be dead centre. Basically you stare past the droplet and see the glint of light in it as a big blurry orb of light. That's the "spotlight", basically.. That's it. If you squint your eyes, and see relatively sharp shadows of your eyelashes impinging on the orb, it's working.
Heh... my myopia is so severe that I get the effect just by taking off my glasses and looking at a point light source.
Christmas trees look like psychedelic, technicolor schools of puffer fish, and I can clearly watch the intra-ocular "weather" as I move my head/eyes around.
Correcting? They mean temporarily cure... If this works, it's fascinating!
One thing I have been wondering for a while, and I thought this what it was when I read the title, is, why can't we have zoom lenses with a camera turned inword to the retina applying autofocus algorithms? As I age, I need a different prescription for every 20 cm I push my laptop back, something like this would be very useful.
BTW: -2 shortsightness is the optimal. You can see your own hands and what you are doing and eating until the day you die. I happen to be those lucky few. On sunny days the iris is so small I can manage without glasses.
My understanding of the parent's post was that someone with -2 vision may expect roughly perfect vision as their eyes age.
I couldn't find a study with data, but there are anecdotal guides online (for picking reading glasses) which state that by 60 years old, it's estimated that a person would need about +2.25 diopters in correction. So someone who is around -2 diopters may expect to have roughly perfect vision as they get older.
This is a misunderstanding of what happens to your eyes as you age. Your eyes lose the ability to change focus. People with normal vision will have their focus stuck near infinity and will need reading glasses for close up things. People with mild myopia will have their focus stuck at close range and therefore won't need reading glasses. They will still need glasses to see clearly far away, but they always did, so it won't be a change for them.
I guess if I had to choose, I would pick needing glasses for far away rather than up close. But I wouldn't trade normal vision for myopia just to avoid needing reading glasses in old age.
My parents had corrective eye surgery in the last decade (corrected their myopia), and they claim the eye surgery damaged their "reading vision." They lament the loss of their reading vision, and I have to keep explaining that they're experiencing presbyopia and not some damage the surgery caused.
My myopia is pretty bad (-9.25 and -8.5 in contacts), so I don't even get the benefit of reading without correction.
> My parents had corrective eye surgery in the last decade (corrected their myopia), and they claim the eye surgery damaged their "reading vision."
I'm -7.00 / -7.25 and this happens to me if I wear contacts instead of glasses. With glasses I can comfortably read a book or screen from about 10 inches away and beyond. With contacts I have to hold it at arms' length before I can make out small text. This is one of the many reasons I've stuck with glasses over the years. Another advantage of glasses is that I can take them off and have a natural and detailed "magnifying" effect. This comes in handy when soldering small components (wearing non-correcting safety glasses) or examining a circuit board for tiny defects like cold solder joints or broken components.
For a disease which affects literally everyone as they age, presbyopia is astonishingly unknown. I didn't hear about it at all until I started working on VR and eye tracking.
It's not just about whether you can see there's an oncoming car. For example, if you can't read the road signs ahead until a few seconds later than someone with "normal" vision, your driving will be seriously affected due to lack of timely information, and the added mental burden of trying to compensate for this.
My contacts are -1.75 with -0.75x148 astigmatism and I can't make out peoples faces unless I'm practically standing next to them. Nevermind trying to read a menu board at a restaurant counter or trying to find my glasses if I misplace them. Driving would be totally out of the question for me.
I wear glasses with similar lens as yours. I only realized I had myopia after starting to go to university, and I only realized I had astigmatism around 2 years later. I guess the brain learns to correct the image, at the expense of some headache if you depend too much on it.
I'm struggling to think of a road sign that isn't either placed well in advance of when you need it, or something like a stop sign where blurriness doesn't matter.
Just street names, I guess? Those are a pain to navigate by anyway. You often already want to be in a lane by the time you can read the sign. The proper the way to relieve that mental burden is to have a navigator or GPS.
As a myopic person wearing glasses for 25+ years, I'd like independent verification of these claims. There are/were a number of similar devices that turned out to be a total dud.
Kubota Glasses technology works to reduce the increase in axial length associated with myopia by projecting myopically-defocused virtual images generated using micro-LEDS on the peripheral visual field to actively stimulate the retina. Passive stimulation using myopic defocus is already in use in the US with a contact lens, “MiSight^® 1 day” by CooperVision, which is U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved to slow the progression of
myopia. This product, which uses multifocal contact lens technology, passively stimulates the entire peripheral retina with light myopically defocused by the
non-central power of the contact lens. Kubota Glasses technology leverages nanotechnology in its electronic glasses-based device and seeks to reduce the progression of
myopia by actively stimulating the retina for shorter periods
while maintaining high-quality central vision and not affecting daily activities.
Strip the jargon away and this sounds like it's saying "wear weaker glasses" and the device is just a fancy way to still see normally while having a weaker prescription in your periphery?
Anecdotally, among a bunch of my friends who are (a) nearsighted, and (b) mad about sailing ships, spending a couple of weeks out at sea staring at the horizon will make a significant temporary difference to their myopia.
I don't know why sibling poster is dead, it seems a fair question and I didn't know the answer so I've asked them and will update when I get a reply.
Edit: The person I asked said they wore their glasses some of the time but also spent some of the time without (when they were climbing in the rigging etc.)
Maybe there is a difference between active and passive retina stimulation in terms of ability to correct myopia? From the article it sounds like they are still determining if they can actually cure myopia and how long the effect lasts. Of course, at least in the US, how they are able to market them depends on what they get FDA approval for.
I read this as "We stuck a ring of LED's around some glasses based on some flimsy science. The glasses cost $0.50 to make, yet we can sell them for $10k a pair.".
From the article: It projects an image from the lens of the unit onto the wearer's retina to correct the refractive error that causes nearsightedness. Wearing the device 60 to 90 minutes a day corrects myopia according to the Japanese company.
No details in the article but I assume the "smart" part of the name implies it can adjust the image to adapt to different people. It's possible it has some kind of algorithm to slowly adjust the prescription over the 60 to 90 days so that your body begins to adjust by making eye muscles stronger. The visual equivalent of braces for your teeth. No real details, just speculation.
(Speculation) Most non-surgical treatments I've looked into to help with nearsightedness are focused on strengthening the muscles that shape the eye's lens. I wonder if this is designed to train those muscles.
It's probably based on the theory that over a longer time frame the eye adapts to slightly defocused images in order to bring them in focus. The key is that the image must be defocused only slightly, not grossly.
It's amazing what the eye can adapt to. The story of the man who wore the glasses that turned everything upside down... and his brain just adapted to it and he saw things normally... is fascinating to me.
And then there's my eyes. I have severe double vision (as a result of surgery last year) and my brain is just like "meh, suck it up"; and I'm left walking into things on regular basis because there's two of everything. How come _his_ brain figured out upside down, and mine can't figure out 2 of everything? (I'm not actually asking, just complaining a bit /sigh)
Yeah, adaptation is incredible when it works but is also hit-and-miss. I don't like the trend of hyperventilating about "your body is amazing and can adapt to anything" because it comes with an unspoken rider of "so if you have problems it's probably just a character flaw".
However, in both of those studies, participants wore their under-corrective glasses continually, regardless of whether they were doing near-work or just walking / looking at a distance. This is a crucial error, as pointed out by at least Hung and Ciuffreda: <https://www.oepf.org/sites/default/files/journals/jbo-volume...>. It makes intuitive sense to me that under-corrective or anti-corrective glasses should only be worn for a limited amount of time each time and only when doing near-work, in order to induce temporary pressure that the (feedback systems of the) eye can then attempt to correct.
Also see this 2009 review by Barrett regarding the more general practice of behavioral vision therapy: <https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-1313.2008.00607.x>. Behavioural vision therapy is a wider term, referring not only to the effort to slow myopia, but also to correct other vision problems through changes in behaviour.
Since it doesn't come in contact with the eye, that doesn't seem to be likely. It could be training the muscles that adjust the curvature of your lens.
Nitpicking, but training eye muscles to tighten/loosen and thereby change the shape of the eyeball is more along the lines of what the technique apparently claims to do, and OP is asking about. Orthokeratology changes only the shape of the cornea, not the eye ball itself; it's a bit like talking about making a telescope physically longer/shorter vs. simply switching out the lens at one end for a different one.
I’ve been in this Facebook group for a while and lots of people have great personal anecdata about their improvements. It’s really interesting to see a medical device come out and if they have clinical trials to back it up.
I've fixed my myopia from -4.25 to -3.25 over the last 5 years (I'm 32). The secret method optometrists don't want you to know, is that I've been staring at a screen just as much and just the same as I've always done.
My point is for some people it can fix itself naturally, so unless studies are double blind, anecdotal claims should be taken with a grain of salt.
this method is absolute snake oil. Google around. Most myopia is axial in nature - in layman terms - your eyeball is just too long. No amount of exercises or staring into the sun is going to reduce its length.
Vision guides the growth of the eye: if spectacle lenses cause images to fall either behind or in front of the retina (hyperopia or myopia, respectively), eye growth compensates for the optical effects of the lenses
The eyeball is not “just” too long. It elongates as a response to the stimuli from the lens projecting an image at a focal length behind the retina. Most kids are not born nearsighted. It develops over time. This is how.
So, they eye works pretty much like a camera - but it's not a camera: it's a complex dynamic self-assembling, self-tuning adaptive structure.
The fact that it's geometry is roughly static around a focal length that has sharp focus on the retina is a wonder of homeostasis with at least three known tuning loops:
1) the lens
Moving on swiftly...
2) a slower feedback loop adjusting the choriod (hence focal length) in the order of hours.
3) an even slower loop adjusting the eye geometry over longer periods of time.
Basically, if you wear goggles that distort your vision for long enough, your visual processing adapts and "corrects" for the distortion such that you can function normally. Then if you remove the goggles your brain still tries to correct for the distortion that isn't there (for a while at least), so the world appears distorted without the glasses.
I have a lot of questions, but I'd definitely pay if it worked. I've very slowly been getting more nearsighted, but I mainly avoid wearing glasses. My optometrist said that wearing glasses would speed the slide, although I'd eventually end up at the same level of myopia. I'd much rather wear glasses that fix the problem than make it worse.
I was in the "slowing going nearsighted and avoiding glasses" phase for quite some time and the result was regular "ice-pick" headaches and migraines. Getting glasses fully cured all of that. My prescription also hasn't changed in 10 years, so (for me, at least) glasses have only had a beneficial effect.
I've been nearsighted my entire life and do not wear glasses. I get the headaches after a couple of hours of wearing them. More than likely it's more to do with what you're accustomed with than how good your vision is.
It's fluctuated from -4.5 to -2.5 over the years. Currently on the better end I think, but I haven't been to an exam in a long while. I have friends with lower than -5 and from trying on their glasses, I would also wear them if my vision was that bad. Even at -4.5 the only major annoyances were street signs and confusing people from far away though.
That's insane to me, I'm at around -3.5 and I feel highly handicapped when I don't wear glasses. I most definitely wouldn't drive without them for instance.
> My optometrist said that wearing glasses would speed the slide
This is a myth widespread among opticians and optometrists. I have discussed it with those who treated me and not a single one could provide any evidence.
That's the interesting part to me. I have very very very slight glasses. If I never put them on, it's fine. If I've been wearing them, and THEN take them off, everything looks horrible.
Happens to me when I switch between contacts and glasses despite the same prescription (well, not that everything looks horrible, but that I notice how accustomed I am to the peculiar way glasses shape the world for a few hours). I wouldn't attribute too much to it.
It's true. I went from pretty good eyesight to +3.25 over a relatively short period of time, but it wasn't an option to wait any longer, I had these crazy headaches and did not realize they were caused by my eyesight being off. The initial glasses were +1.5 and made a world of a difference. 6 months later is was +2.0, another six months and it was at 3.0. That's when I got scared wondering how bad it was going to get but it actually leveled off and took another year or so to go to 3.25 and I've had these for a year now and no difference. I even bought a couple to not have to switch to different models when these wear out (which they inevitably do, they're consumables to me, not something to treat with great care, a couple of hours in the shop and they'll definitely fall at least once on a concrete floor).
I don’t know whether you know, but +3.25 isn’t near-sightedness (myopia), but far-sightedness (hyperopia) or presbyopia (Wikipedia: “insufficiency of accommodation associated with the aging of the eye that results in progressively worsening ability to focus clearly on close objects”) I don’t know whether you know, but +3.25 isn’t near-sightedness (myopia), but far-sightedness (hyperopia) or presbyopia (insufficiency of accommodation associated with the aging of the eye that results in progressively worsening ability to focus clearly on close objects)
I didn't say that it was myopia did I? I specifically gave the glasses strength with the sign to indicate the kind of correction my eyes needed, and yes, it is far-sightedness, what else could it be with that particular prescription? Hence my need to wear them when working in the shop, I'm chance less without them doing any closer or detailed work.
The point was: once you start wearing glasses it accelerates the slide. + or - doesn't really matter all that much.
Do you use these for reading books/screens or also for distance vision? If only for reading, then what you are describing sounds like presbyopia, which is different from far-sightedness. Your accommodation changing as you age is a normal process and doesn't have anything to do with sliding myopia/hyperopia.
That's tricky. The 'light' version certainly helped also with different applications other than just books and screens and I used them in the car regularly, but the higher ones are useless for that because I can't keep all of the interior bits of the car in focus at the same time as the outside world so I drive without glasses, it also significantly reduces my dead angles due to improved peripheral vision.
So there may very well be more than one effect at work here. I can't really see the instrument cluster in the car but I know it by heart so it's not a problem and speed I can do by ear and get it well within the margin of error for speeding tickets.
I should probably get re-tested and maybe try bi-focals, but with the amount of driving I do right now I don't need to bother, the car is used so little I have it on a trickle charger to prevent the battery from going dead.
You probably always had some mild hyperopia that you were able to accommodate, but you lost that ability due to presbyopia. Perfectly natural. I would really recommend getting some multi-focals or to look into other solutions such as monovision.
Glasses don't make it worse, per your optometrist. You just notice where you need to be. I'm about a -9, I wear contacts as much as possible; so I thought that's what you were saying. Don't be afraid to wear glasses.
My optometrist definitely said that I would not end up with worse vision overall, but that my vision would get worse faster. So per my optometrist, glasses do make it worse by my criteria (but not by hers).
That is behind a paywall. Equivalent sites I looked at did not cite studies, frequently depending on an argument from theory. For example, one quoting an optometrist: "'Your actual prescription is based on the anatomy of the eye: the front curve of the cornea, the refractive power of the intraocular lens, and the length of the eyeball.' And peering through spectacles won’t change that anatomy".
But this study shows that at least the kind of glasses one wears can change the progression of myopia, so arguments from theory are unconvincing to me: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22161388/
I have no idea what the actual truth is here. It seems like a variety of opinions abound, although everybody seems to agree the phenomenon of feeling like things are worse when you've recently worn glasses is real. So in this case I'll continue go with what works for me: generally not wearing glasses except when driving, which is the only place it makes a practical difference for me.
Note that if your eyes have different sight strength, you definitely should use glasses. Otherwise the brain learns that signal from one eye is meh, and stops using it as much—so the eye stops focusing.
"myopic defocus is already in use in the US with a contact lens, “MiSight® 1 day” by CooperVision, which is U.S. Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) approved to slow the progression of myopia. This product, which uses multifocal contact lens technology,
passively stimulates the entire peripheral retina with light myopically defocused by the non-central power of the contact lens. Kubota
Glasses technology leverages nanotechnology in its electronic glasses-based device and seeks to reduce the progression of myopia by
actively stimulating the retina for shorter periods while maintaining high-quality central vision and not affecting daily activities."
Which seems to indicate the main beneficiaries will be children, to slow the progression of myopia. As it mentions, there are already multi-focal contact lenses used for that purpose.
Since the contacts don't seem to be marketed at adults, I suspect this will be similar.
On a related note, I find it super interesting that people across many communities and forums report seeing eye sight improvements from daily use of VR headsets. Though it can take a while from those accounts I read, like average 1 hour a day for a year. In each case these people report not wearing glasses in the headset.
It's making a mountain out of a molehill. Yes, there's some evidence that very rigorous, regular eye exercises can help delay or even slightly reverse myopia. Slightly. If you give yourself a headache for like an hour a day, every day. And the effect goes away when you stop exercising.
This is something that has been studied pretty extensively. If it was actually a cure, it'd have been well-proven by now, and we'd all be doing it.
You really should exercise your eyes once in a while if you're staring at a screen all day, though.
> This is something that has been studied pretty extensively. If it was actually a cure, it'd have been well-proven by now, and we'd all be doing it.
Untrue and faulty reasoning. It may have been studied extensively on biased populations, or the research may not have been funded adequately. Anyways, this is part of the "myopia is purely genetic" zeitgeist which is shoved down all of our throats in the west. Meanwhile, studies from Taiwan, Japan, and Korea show that myopia truly has an environmental component to it, e.g. childhood eyestrain and video games.
One may argue that could be because East Asian genetics are different from those of Europeans. I can't say exactly why, but I will say that the mainstream "myopia can't be cured/prevented" rhetoric has been extremely harmful for approximately 2 billion people on this planet.
Urban schools in China and Taiwan used to mandate daily eye exercises in classrooms. There was no effect. It wasn't until Taiwan started requiring more outside time for children that they were able to reverse the myopia trend.
Agreed. I surveyed the existing medical literature on the topic in about 2018 (or was it 2017?) and conclusion was that it is still a very active area of research with a lot of controversy.
Anecdotally, I have a low-grade myopia which gets observably worse after a lot of near work or sitting the whole day in front of a computer. I can pretty consistently reverse through the use of print pushing and use of anti-corrective lenses (basically forcing myself to look at a slightly out-of-focus image each day). It also consistently worsens when I stop doing it, especially when I stop spending time outside.
A good way is to search for articles with "TOPIC" and "review" in the name on e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ or using a tool like https://inciteful.xyz/ (which was featured on HN some days ago). NCBI has an option for filtering by type of article, which includes reviews and systematic reviews.
These kinds of articles will then list relevant results, citing other relevant papers so you can continue going deeper from there.
In addition, wasn't there a study that found Australia children of Asian descent don't follow the same trend of myopia? IIRC, the researchers found that Australian children tend to spend a lot more time outside and get more natural sunlight. I wish I could find the original article.
I think the argument is that this isn't some unknown new untested discovery but instead something well known and constantly studied with disappointing results.
> The traditional eye exercises of acupoints appeared to have a modest protective effect on myopia among these Chinese rural students aged 6–17 years. However, no association between the eye exercises and near vision symptoms was found.
Anecdote:
I used to get new glasses/prescriptions every year. Every year my prescriptions would get stronger.
Last couple of years I stopped renewing my glasses and whenever I absolutely need to get new glasses, I have the store use my old prescription.
For whatever reason, my eye sight stopped getting worse. I think by wearing stronger prescriptions, your eyes adapt to it and you get more and more myopic.
Warning to anyone taking the above as medical advice: perhaps it might work for you, but do discuss with your doctor and check that you are not driving vehicles with worsening sight while believing it's fine. By all means try it, but get it checked so at least you have the data to know whether it works for you.
Start by finding an eye doctor that doesn't have a glasses shop attached, imo. Or one that isn't "attached" to such a shop in a way they would profit from it, I guess. Without insulting any doctor in specific, my thought is that making a profit from glasses being sold is likely to impact how likely the doctor is to prescribe new glasses.
> Or one that isn't "attached" to such a shop in a way they would profit from it, I guess.
Costco is set up this way: their optometrists are contractors who get a flat fee per eye exam, and they don't know or care about what else you buy while you're there.
> making a profit from glasses being sold is likely to impact how likely the doctor is to prescribe new glasses.
And beyond that, following the logic from the recent surgery thread: they see their patients see better. They see all the good cases, where someone walks out more confident and with better sight. Their product helps people. But then so do homeopathic placebos (to a certain (measurable) extent), and that's the hard part to figure out.
Of course, in this case everyone truly does see better when they walk out and what GP is wondering about are the long-term effects. This stuff is complicated, though I frankly have a hard time believing this claim of "just stop wearing glasses and you'll see better". Surely someone would have noticed that? But without doing a deep dive into the research here, it's all just speculation on both their part and mine.
I meant that you can discuss it with your doctor to get their factual knowledge or pointers, and then draw your own conclusions. I didn't say, and didn't mean to say (sorry if it came across like that), that you should follow their advice to any degree. I trust the overwhelming majority of people (doctor or patient) to use their own reasonable judgement, and the rest won't be helped by this advice anyway.
And for what it's worth, you may have had a string of bad doctors. I never had that feeling with any of mine (though I've only ever seen doctors in the Netherlands and Germany).
Your experience is similar to mine. I got glasses at the age of 13, but didn't like wearing the glasses, so never did. Both my late father and my sister (since she was about 12 years old) have to wear thick glasses. My sister started out about the same eye power as I did, but she wears her glasses everyday. My sister's glasses got thicker year over year, and finally she got LASIK a couple of years ago. My sister doesn't work with computers whereas I spend ~10-12 hours a day with computers/TV screens (when I use computer, I don't wear glasses and my eye doctor told me that's okay). For me, my eye power stayed about the same and never got stronger glass prescription over the last 25 years or so.
Having said that, I started wearing glasses about a year ago when watching the TV between 10pm-12am (thanks to my wife who likes watching movies and I joined in). Turns out, my eyesight (near-sight) got a bit worse in a year and now I have a slightly thicker glasses. Again, this is all anecdotal and maybe age comes into play here with my eye sight (but the common knowledge--not sure how true that is--is that the nearsightedness gets better as people age, so what I'm experiencing is the opposite).
Studies of deliberate undercorrection show a slight acceleration in myopia progression. Myopia progression slows and stops naturally after adolescence, whether you wear the correct prescription lenses or not.
The same thing happened to me where I got continually stronger prescriptions, but I stabilized anyways at around 18. My optometrist told me that's very common after adolescence.
I really wouldn't recommend using an incorrect prescription. In the US anyways shops won't let you use a prescription older than 1 year.
Your eyesight might have stopped getting worse on its own. As is the case for most people (myopia doesn't run away to infinity after all!). Which is why corrective surgery is only indicated after your prescription has been stable for some time.
You're probably just getting old. Normal people get farsighted as they age. Myopic people stop getting worse, or even improve a little, and start developing astigmatism.
And to everyone saying "its just age"... well, it doesn't seem that way.
I noticed this pattern and stopped going to the Optometrist for five years. When I finally went again, my myopia was -0.25 worse, so I got new glasses. Then I went again the next year and its -0.25 worse again.
My myopia didn't worsen over a period of five years. Then suddenly worsened over a period of one year.
so I have 2 pairs of glasses, one for clarity at infinity for driving, and another one that's clarity at arms length when I work in the office and staring at monitor all day. I do that because I want my eyes to relax, give it a try!
I asked the optometrist. He was a little offended that I wasn't going to use the new measurements but I pleaded with him enough that he relented.
One very interesting thing that convinced me to start doing this: if you get measurements taken at night (vs early in the day), your prescriptions will be stronger as your eyes are already tired. So your new glasses may be too strong for you but your eyes will adapt to it and become worse.
An optometrist in Germany told me the same regarding measuring eyes in the morning, for what it's worth. I came in after work and they basically turned me away because they didn't think I'd get a good measurement at that time.
Was this in the US? I’ve tried and everyone told me filling an expired prescription is illegal. Even places that don’t do exams. I have an old prescription and don’t want to get an exam because of the pandemic.
I'd recommend getting glasses online from Zenni [0]. They just ask for the measurements of the prescription. There's nothing about expiration dates. And they're super inexpensive! Glasses are a racket.
I can't speak for the quality/durability of their frames, as I only used them to get some prescription lenses for my Valve Index so I can play in VR without wearing my glasses.
For a while I could order from the UK, but I think (at least for the shop I used) they changed this to be more restrictive like the US.
It really is annoying due to the difficulty finding a good optometrist who does more than the basics. The entire process is still a matter of closest estimate when you consider that our eyes don't work in exact "steps" along a range. On top of that, the center point of the lens varies a lot based on exactly how a set of frames sits on your particular face. I've had plenty of glasses that were headache city because the IPD was right, but the lens center didn't line up properly with my pupil (vertically, when worn).
Then don't even get me started on the whole Luxottica thing where it can be another pain in the ass to find nice looking frames at many optometrist-attached stores. There are a few others with both optometrists and glasses sales (Warby Parker, if you have one of the brick and mortars nearby, for example).
For someone like me, even the "cheap" stores usually involve an extra $150-200 per set of glasses due to my cruddy eyesight and the need for the highest index lens material. I usually end up bouncing back and forth between somewhere like Warby when I really am due for another exam and will stomach the $200 cost for $20 worth of plastic. If I break or lose my specs too soon after, I tend to just suck it up and roll the dice with one of the cheapie online vendors.
>The study analyzed 200 pairs of glasses that had been ordered from 10 different websites. The lenses were analyzed based on a number of criteria, including measurement of sphere power, cylinder power and axis, add power (if specified), separation of distance of optical centers and center thickness. The AOA reports that in some cases, single vision lenses were delivered instead of the bifocals that had been ordered. In other cases, specific lens treatments were either added to an or were left off.
>>almost half of the eyeglasses tested in the study (the AOA reports the number at 44.8 percent) didn't have the correct prescription strength or presented problems with safety.
I use firmoo, and I haven't had any issues with the lenses. The only tricky thing is that you need to basically estimate the fit based on the dimensions of glasses frames that you already own.
get the best eye test you can, with a prescription.
buy cheapo online chinese.
zenni optical works fine for me, but with prices from 10 bucks, try several vendors and see which one you personally like.
It works (obviously anecdotal so YMMV). I follow a variant as on endmyopia.org and so far shaved off a couple of diopters from my last good prescription. However, it is a slow and multi year process but you do see a diopter reduction each year consistently. What's more worrying though is if the hypothesis as presented on any of these websites is true, then modern myopia epidemic is exacerbated by using myopia glasses themselves which is quite worrying.
I have bad nearsightedness, and anecdotally if I go without my glasses for awhile, such as when swimming at the beach, my eyesight has improved somewhat by the end of the day. I think it is a combination between using my eye muscles more effectively and learning to better infer what the blobs are.
I was forced to try the referenced Bates method for several years as a child, spending about a half hour a day on it. The experience was not good and the effort would have been much better spent on academics or even sports. After several years my parents changed eye docs, and I got one who would give me real glasses. I remember how awful my mother felt as I tried on the new glasses and exclaimed how amazing it was to be able to see anything at all. Trees have individual leaves, cars have license plates and brands, stores have sales prices posted. It may be possible these exercises work for others, but not for me.
The idea is a lovely one. There is some anecdotal evidence that more time spent outside as a youth reduces the rate of myopia. I don't recall whether the funding was published in science letters or elsewhere but it was an unexpected result of a survey. I see no downside in trying this for my own children, as opposed to my experiment of underpowered glasses and eye exercises. The kids like being out there.
I have been reading about myopia fixes through exercise for years. I see no significant evidence that its possible. I can't find an example of a SINGLE person in history that fixed the issue. E.g. Aldous Huxley never really did, despite writing the book that all current methods are based on.
On the other hand, doing a single-arm chin up seems impossible and takes a decade. Enough funds have not been put into research.
I went pretty deep down this rabbit hole for a while.
I've always been suspicious of eye doctors since every visit they find an excuse to bump you up a notch or two.
Anecdotally, me and my brother had the same prescription in high school. I started refusing to go to the eye doctor. He kept going. I happened to see his contacts prescription maybe six years later. His prescription was now over a diopter stronger than mine. I needed new contacts, so went to an exam about that time. My prescription was still the same, "Well we'd like to bump you up a notch, but you can stay at this level if you want."
Further, I noticed growing up that the kids with the worst eyesight were the ones whose parents had the best insurance and could afford twice per year exams.
Anyway, I think glasses do irreparable harm to vision (particularly during adolescence). I think that will be borne out by research if anyone ever looks into it.
The myopia correction exercises do seem to help, but it's a fickle process. If it was easy it wouldn't be controversial.
I would describe my experience as your baseline vision stays roughly the same, but you can learn to focus for short periods
of time and improve your acuity by maybe 1 - 2 diopters.
You know what else does irreparable harm? Failing classes because you can't see!
Most people don't just decide that "hey, today is a good day for me to start wearing glasses, wouldn't it be cool!?"
For young kids, it's usually when they start doing badly in classes or people notice they are squinting. For adults, it's having trouble with things like the DMV exam, caught by routine checkups, or when they notice their peers can see much better than they can.
I could also give you endless anecdotes "proving" the opposite point, that wearing glasses can slow down or stop the progress, but why bother. That's all they are, they are not facts.
And that's why I said, "I think that will be borne out by research if anyone ever looks into it."
> You know what else does irreparable harm? Failing classes because you can't see!
And I am implying that I believe we are treating that problem sub-optimally and that I believe a better solution could be found for the majority of cases where myopia is an issue.
I read back through what I wrote and I believe I had a fairly measured tone with it. You disagree, that's fine. The whole point of "science" is that people are allowed to have contrary hypotheses and the data should be the final arbiter or who is correct.
I was recommended this as a child - any improvement was temporary, and at best this will slow down the progression of myopia very slightly, in childhood.
Nothing beats sunlight and outdoor activity in childhood for reducing myopia, but if you already have it as an adult - you're stuck with it.
Doesn't this article suggest there's some truth to strengthening the eye to improve Myopia, though?
While the "new glasses" could of course be snake oil - assuming they're not for discussion would suggest that the muscles can be strengthened/corrected and all we're discussing is an implementation detail.
That's assuming these glasses actually work in this fashion, though. .. and that they work, of course.
If it actually worked long-term, it would be a published paper on PubMed and ophthalmologists would be readily prescribing it to their patients.
I'm not ruling out a temporary improvement in myopia from exercises. Sort of like squinting or putting eye drops in your eyes can temporarily make you less nearsighted.
But if there are positive, long-term effects from simple, harmless exercise (spoiler alert - you can't change the shape of your eye permanently with exercise like you can with a muscle), it would be part of eye doctor's treatment plans everywhere.
I've been doing the method in your second link (tl;dr: buy every pair of glasses between your prescription and 0 in 0.25 diopter increments, and slowly work your way down to 0).
I started at the beginning of quarantine, and it's actually been a wonderful time to try this since I rarely /need/ to look at anything farther away than my laptop screen. I started at a -2.25 diopter prescription in each eye. So for about $120 I got every pair of glasses down to 0.25 diopters, and a Snellen chart to track progress. Today, I'm down to a -1.25 prescription, although I plan on seeing an optometrist to confirm this once it's safe in the world to do so again.
The things I noticed during this experiment:
> It takes about a month minimum to drop down a prescription (I measure it as once I can reliably read to the 20/30 line on the Snellen chart).
> Given the above, I wear `current prescription + 0.5 diopters` whenever driving to make sure I'm well above the legal limits for driving (which is 20/40 vision)
> Going outside and just looking at stuff that's far away has the biggest positive effect on improving vision.
> Given 30 seconds of actively focusing, I can see temporary gains to my vision for the next 30 minutes or so
> My vision is waaay better in the morning
> I can now work on my laptop without needing glasses (still difficult to watch tv, though)
> Given the focus on what is and isn't blurry, I've started noticing the insane effect the brightness of a room has on how blurry things are
> I'm terrible at tracking data, given that I only have about 10 entries in my very basic excel sheet
> This has made me go on walks more often, which is just a net good all around. It feels "productive" to go for a walk rather than boring.
> It's very possible that this has only a limited return it can provide, since I've been plateaued at -1.25 for the last 3 months.
For those interested, there are a couple of treatments available in the U.S. to slow the progression of childhood myopia. MiSight[0] contacts and low-dose atropine[1].
From IIH. Pressure in head changes constantly, which affects ability to control horizontal eye muscles. I still can, but I have to strain to an extremely painful degree.
When at highest
+24 od Prism glasses -1.5 left eye +1 right Eye.
"It projects an image from the lens of the unit onto the wearer's retina to correct the refractive error that causes nearsightednes" so regular glasses then...
The "myopia is purely genetic" zeitgeist has been continually shoved down all of our throats in the west. Meanwhile, studies from Taiwan, Japan, and Korea show that myopia truly has an environmental component to it, e.g. childhood eyestrain and video games. It's also undeniable that myopia manifests more in middle class workers than working class, which indicates some sort of systematic environmental component.
Since the article is specifically about Japan and Asian markets, I must add this: One may argue that the discrepancy in mainstream scientific conclusions could simply be due to differences in genetics between East Asians and Europeans. This mainstream "myopia can't be cured/prevented" rhetoric has been extremely harmful for approximately 2 billion people on this planet.
The predisposition to myopia is genetic but one becomes myopic due to an environmental factor: the lack of exposure to sunlight. It is because of the lack to regular exposure to sunlight that people who study and spend a lot of time in homes can develop myopia if they are genetically predisposed.
Focusing on nearby objects does not lead to myopia. Doing gymnastics with the eyes has no effect. Likewise, using under-sized glasses has no effect on myopia.
Here a supporting article about Inuit populations developed myopia just in one generation because of changes in lifestyle reducing outdoor activities:
This reminds me of archetypal idyllic images of ancient Greek education where a philosopher is teaching a group of students in an outdoor amphitheater. Maybe we need to redesign our schools to be outdoor, or at least with indoor structures with generous amounts of natural lighting.
Outdoor schools were a thing in recent history. It gained a lot of traction about 100 years ago until the 1930's. It was called the "open air school" movement. I think it was started mostly to combat a rise tuberculosis.
I don’t trust most people to apply sunscreen effectively. You really need a lot of it for adequate protection, and by the time you apply that much, you become an oily slippery mess leaving sunscreen on every surface you touch. It’s easier to just stay the hell away from the sunlight and any surface that reflect light.
There may be some correlation but there must be other factors. Doesn't fit my history. I'm myopic, -6.0 diopter, needed glasses starting in 2nd grade. Spent a lot of time outdoors as a kid (no computers, 3 channels of TV which was targeted at grownups except for Saturday morning). Being inside was boring.
Nearsightedness also runs in the family on my fathers side, but strangely none of my kids need glasses and they all grew up with much more TV and other screen time than I had.
I accept that this isn't anything more than anecdote, but my mother was very myopic. I grew up in the boonies, spent loads of time outdoors, had no video games until I was in high school, and was allowed very little TV time.
I still needed glasses by 2nd grade and finally leveled out somewhere around the -8.50 range in my mid-late 30s. Hasn't really gotten too much worse as I got older, but as a lovely side note, I'm in my early 40s now and am getting the slightest bit of trouble on the other end of the spectrum where I can't always focus on small, close-up things if I have my glasses on. Guess it'll be time for bifocals soon.
It does seem like a convenient "just-so" anecdote, and I've never experienced or heard of myopia just going away like that, but I also don't think it sounds completely implausible.
I'd imagine it's also less noticeable in scenarios when you don't need to read smaller letters from a distance as much (ie: when you are playing outside rather than sitting in class).
Also in bright light your pupils are constricted so depth of field is greater. In dim light your pupils are dialated and depth of field is shallower. Same principle as a camera lens f-stop.
So the perception that you see more clearly in bright outdoor conditions could be true.
From tons of articles, medical advices, etc. that insist that "you don't develop myopia from reading, monitor work, video games, etc".
They not not say that it's "purely genetic", but that's the impression one gets, that all those lifestyle params don't play any role...
Wikipedia says it's "a mix of genetic and environmnetal factors", and includes all of the above factors I've mentioned. But I've read many times in the past decades articles insisting that those other things don't matter (and presenting it as the medical consensus)...
> From tons of articles, medical advices, etc. that insist that "you don't develop myopia from reading, monitor work, video games, etc".
As an adult, it would certainly be an outstanding discovery if this did matter. Which is why I'm skeptical about these supposed glasses. Sounds like snake oil, quacks like snake oil.
For children, teenagers and young adults: maybe. It's all about the eye shape, and children's bodies are still in development.
>As an adult, it would certainly be an outstanding discovery if this did matter.
Why not? It's not about being "still in development".
All of our organs (heart, liver, knees, joints, ears) can deteriorate in various ways if we don't take care of them or abuse them in certain ways as adults (e.g. ears and loud music, especially on headphones, can lead to reduced hearing). Heart, well, we can have the heart of a 80 year old at 40 if we have the wrong lifestyle.
So why not eyes as well?
(Not to mention myopia usually rises over time in adults that have it - and they change glass perscriptions etc.), so it's clearly something that develops in adulthood too. Not to mention other things related to the eyes and their plasticity etc., like presbyopia, that strike at ~ 40-45 or so.
> myopia truly has an environmental component to it
Very much possible. I only have anecdotal evidence, but if you plotted the amount of time I spent at home starting at a TV versus other kids, you will probably find interesting correlations.
> , e.g. childhood eyestrain and video games.
Why single out video games in particular? If there is a problem, the problem is the screen. Or rather, how close it is. It is unlikely to be related to the content.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn about a feedback loop getting disrupted. For many organs in the body, an approximate shape will work just fine, who cares if an organ is slightly off by a few millimeters. Not so for the eyes.
The factors weren't "childhood eyestrain and video games". The one consistent factor was the amount of bright light exposure in a study[1]; in other words, being indoors, away from bright sunlight, which is correlative to eyestrain and video games, not causative, because people tend to do those things indoors. If you read outdoors in bright light, it's not really worse than just hanging around in bright light.
Couldn't find a non-paywalled PDF, sorry, but here's the original study:
Also, it might have changed since then (2012). If there's since been a study refuting this one, let me know, because it's nigh-impossible to find between the glut of citation-free news sites and blog posts, and paywalled journals.
The currently favored theory is that it's due to a lack of UV light reaching the eye. It's not (just) video games, it's (also) school and generally being indoors instead of out at midday.
There's no such theory, and exposure to light brightness has nothing to do with myopia. Being outdoors causes less close up focus, which slows the progression of myopia.
The way I understand it is that it only matters while the eye is still developing, so if you're over 10 it's too late anyway. The thing with UV more generally is that we've obviously evolved with them, so while they are dangerous in some respect we also depend on them. In this case, protecting your eyes too much early is probably detrimental, but not protecting them later on probably is as well.
I have bad myopia (around -5) both my parents have it too and to me it has always been evident that it isn't purely genetic. I think I could willfuly downgrade my vision if I concentrated.
In my family (n=basically_none), it seems that myopia correlates strongly with habits. The most bookish, indoors-y kids ended up in glasses - and the more so, the thicker the glasses - while folks who spent their childhoods running around outside tend to have 20/20 vision.
Assuming such an effect really exists, I expect it would be very difficult to statistically distinguish from straight heredity. Kids' early childhood habits tend to reflect family culture.
OTOH, perhaps those who are starting to have myopia aren't going to want to do outdoorsy things because they tend to require far-seeing. If I can't see what's going on far away, I'm not going to have a fun time with most sports, and I'd rather read a book.
The other hypothesis I've heard is that it's switching back and forth between focusing on close-up things and distant things. Which you naturally do a lot when engaging in outdoor activities, but basically not at all when staring at books or screens.
I have hypermyopia (-12.5 left, -13 right) and my sister has 20/15 vision. Same childhood environment as her and I needed glasses before I could even read, let alone before I ever played a video game.
It's well beyond a genetic predisposition, it was a genetic guarantee for me.
Not sure if it'll help, there's an older gentleman on Youtube who claims reading with glasses actually makes myopia worse with time, due to the way it affects the shape of the eyeballs. Look up Tod Becker.
Reads like snake oil to me. I'd love to learn how this devices reshapes your eye lens when not worn. There are methods out there that people swear by, but I haven't seen a drop of evidence. I'd jump at the opportunity if it worked.
There is Orthokeratology, which physically deforms the cornea via a contact lens, and lasts about a day or two. But it isn't ideal, and can have bad outcomes.
That's correct, at least in my experience. I could have worked around the every-afternoon decline by carrying a number of glasses in -1.00 to -6.00 and switching among them as needed, or by wearing the ortho-k lenses, which I could tolerate with my eyes closed while I slept, but would have been intolerable while performing any normal activities. Either way, that completely negated my goal of being able to live corrective lens-free during my waking hours.
The other thing that really bugged me was the fact that these lenses could not correct my vision across my entire dilated pupil, and that issue also got worse as the day went on. That resulted in terrible halos around light sources in high contrast situations, such as at night when driving home from work.
I wore ortho-k lenses from about 10 years old into my twenties. I switched to daily disposables as I think they are more convenient but when I was younger and playing more sports the ortho-k lenses were great. There is also some evidence that they can prevent eyesight from deteriorating.
If this worked I would take a loan if that's what it took.
Most likely snake oil. Even more so since they are calling it "smart", I'm surprised there's no blockchain.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This thing can somehow physically reshape the eyes (or the cornea at least) permanently, with no surgery.
Physically reshaping the eye, isn't as crazy as it sounds.
Your eye shape/length isn't set, it can both shorten and lengthen in response to stimulus.
I am by no means claiming this device works, just that changing the shape of the eye is at least theoretically possible without surgery.
"
Maturity and Homeostasis of Refractive State
Although emmetropization is generally thought of as occurring during early development, homeostatic growth mechanisms need to be at least as precise during maturity if size is to be tightly maintained. Does vision guide eye growth only during a narrow period in development? In tree shrews, there is clear evidence of a period of maximum sensitivity to form deprivation (Siegwart and Norton, 1998). In chicks, however, it appears that susceptibility declines steadily from the earliest period, perhaps being related to the growth rate, with older animals showing consistent but smaller responses to form deprivation (Wallman et al., 1987), even up to 1 year of age (Papastergiou et al., 1998). Adolescent marmosets and rhesus macaques also show decreased, but still significant, form-deprivation myopia Smith et al. 1999, Troilo et al. 2000b. In humans as well, there is evidence of changes in ocular dimensions in young adults associated with the progression of myopia, perhaps related to visual tasks (McBrien and Adams, 1997). Thus, the young adult eye is still subject to visually guided growth."
"Through further clinical trials, it is trying to determine how long the effect lasts after the user wears the device, and how many days in total the user must wear the device to achieve a permanent correction for nearsightedness."
Maybe some of you will find this beneficial if you have slight vision issues. It’s anecdotal, I don’t have scientific backing here. It worked for me, and I think it’s harmless to try. What I’m about to describe is what I think is the Active Focus method.
I’ve always had perfect vision but my dominant eye degraded slightly over the years so I looked into how to bring it back to full. No one in family wears glasses or anything like that, although the elderly use reading glasses of course.
Practicing reading on both monitor and in front of a book with the good eye palmed and trying to shift the focus back and forth while gunning for more clarity for a longer period of time, it took me very little to get rid of the issue - I must have practiced probably 30 times of a few minutes each over the span of a few months, so maybe once every 2nd or 3rd day as I felt like it. I went from having a hard time reading the numbers and letters to very carefully observing the edges of fonts rendered by ClearType antialiasing on Windows.
At first the eye muscles got strained from me forcing it to focus, but then it got better. Minor soreness and redness at first is nothing to be concerned about IMHO. I still practice but not as often, since I’ve trained the ability to focus at will which is really what active focus is about from my understanding - intentional focusing with enough speed.
I’m not a big fan of EndMyopia but the subreddit has people claiming they fixed far worse problems than I have (if slight blurryness is even worthy being called a problem).
I highly recommend Todd Becker’s presentation on Active Focus for anyone wanting a breakdown of the approach. Some people seem to have a hard time with being able to finely control where their focal plane is. It gets easier with practice is about all I can say.
The full “method” that Todd Becker and EM recommend is to try to keep distance to whatever that you’re reading so that it’s just slightly out of focus, but I haven’t had that severe of a myopia. From time to time I read sites like HN from slightly further away than usual just to provide a bit of a challenge to the focus practice, but I think long term it probably isn’t healthy to try to read HN at normal font size from across the room.
I summarized the EndMyopia/Todd Becker stuff at losetheglasses.org if anyone wants a short, readable version. The method continues to work for me, albeit slowly.
One thing I forgot to mention is that when I started, I didn’t even have actual blurriness for the most part (unless it’s really far away). I had double vision along the vertical axis, and I did what Becker recommended to do which is to try to focus on the actual object (in my case mostly text), and ignore the ghosted copy so that two of them can converge. I would then intentionally defocus by looking in front or behind the text, and then try to refocus again. It keeps it slightly interesting/amusing.
There’s way more stuff out there on this topic today then there was when I first started practicing it, but it doesn’t seem to have changed all that much. People are still very skeptical about it and I guess optometrists still don’t talk about it.
Endmyopia is real. It works, and I’m not a shill. I went from severe myopia to 20/20 vision; although you need to put the effort in (took me 2 years to get to 20/20, but improvements have been steady).
I genuinely believe that optometrists are either evil, or horribly misguided with hubris.
My mother believes that stuff, so I did not have glasses as kid and could not see much
It worked well enough that my myopia did not progress. However, I got bad astigmatism
Optometrists are really bad at measuring anything. Endmyopia probably works best for people who never had myopia, but the optometrists just measured some temporary accommodation as myopia. They always kept measuring my astigmatism as myopia for years. Only now that they have modern wavefront aberrometers, the device could tell them that they have measured the cylinder as 2 diopters too weak
I’m talking about nearsightedness. But in all honesty I don’t know what the underlying causes are as I haven’t been to an optometrist about it. I think my last check up was when I was in grade 6. Horrible, I know. I noticed it a few years ago and it bothered me enough to do some late night googling to see what snake oil I come across, but I decided to give it a try as a “I doubt I’ll permanently injure my eye trying to get it to focus”. I’ve been staring at a computer screen for well over 25 years, almost every day. I think that at this point it’s more of a genetic lottery that I’m not wearing glasses for severe myopia more than anything.
It’s not perfect like it was when I was younger, I don’t know if it’ll ever be to that level of clarity but I did develop the ability to rapidly focus which for me is “good enough.” I don’t always have to force the focusing - relaxing the eye and not blinking also does the trick, but I combine both of them since I think of it as stretching the muscle out slightly, making it more elastic by ping ponging between focal planes a little bit. Either way, as long as I can impress the plebs by being able to read road signs at a distance that they can’t, I’ll be alright.
I wanted to make the original post because, HN being inquisitive into longevity and health research, I’m very surprised that over the years very few people discussed active focus or other “alternative” vision correction methods. I’m sure there must be lots of people who wear vision correction here. I’d rather not, so I decided to try the weird stuff first and see how things go.
Ugh. I had fairly stable myopia and was content. Recently developed astigmatism in my strong eye and so my overall vision is substantially worse.
Anyone know what can cause sudden onset of astigmatism in adulthood? It appeared a couple years ago and seems stable. Not sure over what period it appeared, probably in 3-12 months.
Me too. It is really bad. Myopia is no issue when I work at the computer, since I can move closer, but with astigmatism I cannot read at all without glasses. It has recently increased to 3.5 diopter cylinder according to the measurement device. At those values it is even difficult to buy glasses.
>Anyone know what can cause sudden onset of astigmatism in adulthood? It appeared a couple years ago and seems stable. Not sure over what period it appeared, probably in 3-12 months.
I paid $4,200 for it in San Diego, California. Maybe it can be cheaper elsewhere.
Side effects = NOTHING. Seriously. The operation is legitimately nothing, super duper quick. You walk into a room and in less than fifteen minutes you walk out with perfect vision. It's unbelievable.
Satisfied? Very much. I now have perfect vision. I still forget sometimes. Like I'll take off my shirt at the end of the night and will be pulling it away as if I had glasses on.
Or I'll even go to take off my glasses when I get in bed and realize I don't have glasses.
I will say...everyone throughout life treated me like a "very smart person"(tm) but now that is less so and I'm starting to think the glasses had something to do with it :D
That's a tough nut to crack as everyones axis to the astigmatism is custom, nevermind the combination of powers to compensate for the actual focal issues.
I wonder if there is a way to "read" how elongated your eyeball is, detect imperfections on the surface level and create a smart glass that adjusts what you see based on these "customizations".
Imagine training the brain to see properly, I doubt it will change in adults however.
Even wearing light sunglasses helps tremendously but because of the socially frowned upon nature of wearing shades indoors and the long term effect of opening up the cornea constantly isn't good, it is a bandaid problem.
I look good too in shades and I can't use astigmatism as an excuse similar to how using one's Asperger syndrome diagnosis as a license to be insensitive cannot expect positive societal feedback.
Enchroma has a product to correct for varities of color blindness, but they overall effect is still sunglasses to those looking at you.
Like anyone with a visible disability it takes education and time to normalize things, triple-so for those with disabilities that are not immediately presenting.
astigmatism is a nasty beast. Looking back at my prescriptions my astigmatism can jump all over the place, even within 4 months period. I had a holiday in Japan once, and they make you a pair of glasses within an hour, so I got some as a backup despite I've only just got a new pair recently and the astigmatism axis was a complete flip...
This will absolutely not, under any circumstances, "correct" myopia. You can only slow its progression, with techniques like:
- Pupil dilating eye drops
- Wearing corrective lenses as little as possible
- Wearing glasses with fogged edges/rims
- Reducing the time you hold objects close to your face
The major factor behind all of this is to reduce the over focusing of light on your retina and fovea. The more light that focuses back there, the more your eye is told to grow longer.
Every parent should know this and how it works. And so should your ophthalmologist, most of which are clueless.
You can't, in any way, undo this growth once it's happened. This is terrible reporting.
Before looking into this, I would have guessed 2X or 3X, but would you believe it's actually over 100X!
I bet most people's guess would also be off by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude.
Even outdoors in the shade, it is over 50X brighter than indoors.
(For specific numbers and comparisons, see: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6656201/ )
Apparently, our eyes adjust so quickly to the difference that we have a very poor sense of the magnitude of light change between indoors and outdoors.
I bring this up because one of the largest factors in myopia development appears to be outdoor light exposure in childhood.
Genetics are likely a factor too, but light exposure seems to have a huge effect: "The prevalence of myopia in 6- and 7-year-old children of Chinese ethnicity was significantly lower in Sydney (3.3%) than in Singapore (29.1%), while patterns of daily outdoor light exposure showed that children living in Singapore were exposed to significantly less daily outdoor light than Australian children." (from the same study linked above)
The obvious takeaway for parents, schools, and governments: ensure your children have plenty of outdoor playtime. It will greatly reduce instances of myopia (not to mention the benefits from higher Vitamin D levels, exercise, etc).