Myopia epidemic in the world

Myopia for those who have the privilege of not knowing what excessive elongation of the eye is, you may not remember this, but when you were a baby you saw blurry, this is because our eyes when they are new are flat and the light that passes through of our cornea and the lens do not focus on the retina but a little behind, producing blurry images. This is called hyperopia.

But as we grow, our eyes also grow with us and lengthen until around the age of 4, our eyes finally lengthened enough for the retina to reach the focused image and it is assumed that from then on our eyes should continue growing with the same proportions until our adulthood, when this happens people have perfect vision.

If you are not so lucky, your eye, after reaching its ideal shape at 4 years old, continues to lengthen until the retina is behind where the image is focused and this is called myopia, and again you are left seeing blurry, to be able to see. Well you need concave lenses that focus the light further back where your retina is.

The magnitude of myopia is measured in negative diopters, just as hyperopia is measured in positive diopters.

Why does myopia occur? It has become an epidemic, reaching alarming levels, especially in young people. That is a question that we had a hard time answering. In 1611, Johammes Kepler, you know, the musician, mathematician and astronomer who described the movement of the planets, said that “those who do close-up work from a young age become myopic” which makes a lot of sense, we generally associate people who read a lot with poor eyesight and the use of glasses, glasses are for bookworms not For those who play sports, obviously there are exceptions but that's how the stereotype works.

In the mid-1800s it was already clear that reading in low light or having the text very close to the eye damaged eyesight and devices were even built to prevent people from getting too close to the book to read, I suspect it looked like a torture machine, but if it fulfilled its function it was worth it; Getting too close to the text damages your eyesight and in fact it is one of the signs that children do not see well, if you do not see well you get closer to the text and getting closer to the text damages your eyesight more, it is a vicious circle.

We already knew about the cause of myopia and we were not so confused, but then in 1928 a study of the child population of London attributed myopia to genetics, which was a setback because at that point it was thought, Okay, if myopia is genetic, it's not genetic. there is nothing to do, grab two bottles, we basically gave up for decades, myopia was seen as a condition to be treated, rather than a disease that can be prevented.

But later in time, until the mid-90s, an Australian researcher named Ian Morgan who was studying how dopamine affects the sending of signals in the nerves of the eye came across this Mysterious epidemic of myopia that by that time was already causing ravaged Asia and questioned the genetic origin of myopia when there was a study on how Inuit people in the 1970s went from having a 5% to 60% incidence of myopia in a single generation.

The only possible culprit was the radical change in their lifestyle, as it coincided with the establishment of a school system like that of the rest of the civilized world, replacing the traditional way in which adults taught children to hunt, fish, build. and create their clothes and all those things that an Inuit should know.

He also found a study on how ultra-Orthodox Jewish boys who were required to study their religious texts outside of school were disproportionately more myopic than their sisters who are not allowed to do that extracurricular activity, which led him to start in 2003, along with his colleagues Katherine Rose and Paul Mitchell a study looking at differences in the lifestyle of 6 and 12 year old children in Sydney and several cities in Asia, where there was a much higher incidence of myopia in 2008 published the result, the only difference was the amount of time they spent outside in the fresh air.

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