Every morning, senior Jada King opens her eyes to a blurry world. She feels around for her glasses, her hands patting around her table. Once she finds them and slides them onto her face, the blur of colors clarify into sharper details, allowing her to begin her day.
According to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, myopia, or nearsightedness, is a condition when close-up objects look clear, while far-away objects look blurry. And according to an NPR article, in the US alone, rates of myopia have increased from 25% in 1971 to 42% in 2017.
King is among these myopic Americans, and she said her vision started getting blurry when she was in third grade.
“I couldn’t see the board when I was sitting at the front of the class, so I got glasses,” King said. “Without my glasses, things one to two feet in front of me start getting blurry, so I wear my glasses pretty much every single day all the time as long as I’m awake.”
But for many people like junior Keerath Pujji, glasses aren’t just for correcting vision. She said wearing glasses has influenced her lifestyle and how others view her.
“It was more so the small things,” Pujji said. “When I was a kid, it really had an impact. I had to get a (thick) prescription if I wanted to go swimming. It was harder because no one I knew really had glasses. I was the only one that had to deal with constantly going to the doctors to get new prescriptions.”
Dr. Thomas Aller, an optometrist and myopia researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, said myopia is typically caused by genes, and many people are either born with it or develop it early. Aller also confirmed myopia rates have been rising.
“There has been an increase in the need for vision correction in society over the last 40, 50 years,” Aller said. “The main source for that is an increase in myopia or nearsightedness. The world is headed toward a projected 50% of the population becoming nearsighted by the year 2050.”
Dr. Michael Repka, a professor of ophthalmology and pediatrics at John Hopkins University, said there are factors suspected to be the cause of myopia outside of genes, but the research hasn’t been conclusive.
“(People may) spend way too much time reading things up close, and maybe that drives the eye to change shape,” Repka said. “One sort of overarching theme is less natural light and being indoors. There are a number of theories about what (a lack of) natural light might do to inhibit cell growth or signaling in the retina, such as that simply by focusing your eye, you’re eliciting chemicals within the eye that somehow causes the eye to elongate.”
With the increased time spent indoors, Aller said myopia can lead to underlying long-term consequences.
“The problem with myopia isn’t simply that kids have to wear glasses,” Aller said. “It’s that it gets worse and worse each year because the eye is getting longer and longer. And there’s a finite amount of stretching that the eye can tolerate before things start to get stretched beyond what they were intended to be stretched. That sets these kids up for a future of higher risk of some vision threatening complications such as glaucoma, cataracts, retinal detachments and tears, and something called myopic maculopathy, which is irreversible damage.”
But Repka said few methods seem to slow the progression of myopia.
“The best public health strategies available today are to take breaks while reading up close,” Repka said. “The second is to spend a little bit more time outdoors doing non-reading, non-academic, tasks.”
And King said she has implemented some of these strategies in her own life.
“One of the things is just taking breaks from screens and reading and all kinds of close up activities,” King said. “I try to reduce my screen time as much as possible. For example, I don’t take notes on my computer. I take notes on paper.”
Even so, Pujji said protecting their vision is hard to do in today’s world.
“It’s very hard for teenagers especially because there’s so many things that we have to do that are online,” Pujji said. “So I think it would be kind of hard to say just stop using screens. But knowing the factors that can make you more susceptible to having bad eyesight is just as important as taking preventative measures to make sure that your eyes are safe.”
The alternative beyond behavior change, according to Aller, are new technologies.
“Things like bifocal contact lenses that focus a light on the back of the eye properly,” Aller said. “Orthokeratology, which is a lens that you wear overnight, and when you wake up in the morning, you take them off and you can see without them, which is really amazing. Most of these methods will slow the growth by 40 to 80% depending on the child or the treatment.”
Ultimately, King said people should appreciate and care for their vision.
“Our eyes are very important to whatever you need in the future,” King said. “You need them to see and to work, and there are a few things that your body can’t recover from, and permanent eye damage is definitely one of those things. You have to be careful about it.”
