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Shortsightedness has become an epidemic

economist.com

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Re: Shortsightedness has become an epidemic

#351

Post by trashface »

jart wrote: post #41
harshreality wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Myopia is a risk factor for floaters, retinal detachment, and glaucoma. It's objectively not neutral, despite that glasses exist. Glasses are also inconvenient, cost money, can be lost or broken, and don't cover the entire field of vision, and contacts have their own problems.

I can't believe you're serious. I wear glasses and there's nothing wrong with me. Last thing I want is to live in a world where I'm pressured to be genetically engineered for having the wrong kind of eyes.

You can get glaucoma later in life. I was diagnosed in my mid-40s, now I have to take drops for the rest of my life. And still might go blind. Some people with open-angle glaucoma don't even know they have it, which is why it is referred to as "the silent thief of sight". I'd definitely take a genetic cure for this if one existed.

There might be nothing wrong with you now, but there is no guarantee it will stay that way.

Re: Shortsightedness has become an epidemic

#352

Post by atombender »

Aulig wrote: post #325

Honestly, myopia is not complicated (Kepler pretty much had it right in 1604 already). There's countless studies showing that axial length (eyeball length) changes in both directions, where elongation increases myopia. How do you change it? You get defocus (blur) which makes the eye adjust in the direction to reduce the blur. Practically: use weaker (around 1.5 diopters) or no glasses during close-up work (reading, c…

Is there a single step-by-step guide that shows what to do?

All I can find on that (frankly quite awful) site are ways to sign up to a course by email, lots of podcast episodes, testimonials for people that improved their eyesight, and endless photos of what I assume is the site's creator. The "Guides" page doesn't actually have any guides, just more of the same.

From what I can tell, the guy really wants to sell you a course, but at the same time, they are all "sold out".

Re: Shortsightedness has become an epidemic

#353

Post by lukeschlather »

underwater wrote: post #334

My child is following in my footsteps and has been prescribed glasses for nearsightedness. Her optometrist told us she should be watching TV rather than reading books. This was both surprising and upsetting, especially since she loves reading. This lead me on an interesting deep dive into existing research. What surprised me were the massive gaps in understanding. Scientist have at best established correlation betwee…

I'm not going to speculate on the exact cause but I'm comfortable saying children should have 2-3 recess periods outside totalling at least an hour (preferably 2 or 3) and that the recess periods should be structured to ensure that children spend time focusing on a variety of things at a variety of distances. There's certainly a possibility this won't have the intended effect but it will doubtlessly have a lot of net good effects assuming air quality cooperates.

Re: Shortsightedness has become an epidemic

#354

Post by tchvil »

throwaway202022 wrote: post #310
thaumasiotes wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mine is genetic. > I have very simil[a]r values than my mother. Well, everything is genetic. The amount of sunlight you're exposed to is no less a genetic effect than how tall you grow to be. Without genes, you wouldn't have any behaviors or phenotypes at all. So the interesting question is not "is this phenomenon genetic?", because the answer to that is always "yes". The interesting question is "what can influence…

This is 100% true. Genetic predisposition to something != inevitability.

My wife is -3 myopic, I'm -6 from childhood. And our 3 kids of 19, 17 and 10, have all a perfect sight.

They went outside often but nothing extreme. We have big luminous windows. And they spend a fair amount of time on screens too.

It can be so multifactorial, I have no idea why this luck. As I was convinced they would all wear glasses.

Re: Shortsightedness has become an epidemic

#355

Post by ByteJockey »

delecti wrote: post #324
d0mine wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should be easy to answer: we are not smarter in the recent decades (the opposite is likely true due to the leaded petrol). The natural selection for smartness is too weak in humans (it does not take much brain to reproduce nowadays). The hypothesis in TFA is much more likely (regular exposure to bright daylight in children)

On the contrary, IQ has been increasing decade-over-decade basically since IQ was invented. So we are smarter in recent decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect (Though because IQ is standardized around a mean of 100, it's probably more accurate to say that the IQ of people in the past has retroactively gotten lower)

It's considered to have ended (and possibly started reversing) in developed countries starting in the mid 1990s.

Your link even covers it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...

Re: Shortsightedness has become an epidemic

#356

Post by trashface »

underwater wrote: post #334

My child is following in my footsteps and has been prescribed glasses for nearsightedness. Her optometrist told us she should be watching TV rather than reading books. This was both surprising and upsetting, especially since she loves reading. This lead me on an interesting deep dive into existing research. What surprised me were the massive gaps in understanding. Scientist have at best established correlation betwee…

After being diagnosed with glaucoma I did a fair amount reading about that condition. My conclusion is that aside from some specific cases (head/eye injury) nobody really knows what causes it, there are probably multiple reasons, it could be a downstream effect from other health problems, and there just isn't a lot of research to sort it out.

Cynically, I feel like there is a lot of money being made just by treating eye disorders the same way its been done for decades. For example, right now, the main treatment I use for glaucoma is eye drops, which is the same treatment given to my grandmother when she was diagnosed in the 1960s. And those drops are not covered by insurance, rather expensive, and I have to take them every day forever, along with twice a year eye exams and visual field tests.

Re: Shortsightedness has become an epidemic

#357

Post by stevebmark »

stevenhuang wrote: post #145
silisili wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. My wife had no electricity for her child life, but is nearsighted... probably from reading books all the time as a kid. I don't believe that light has anything to do with it.

You don't think reading in a low light environment has anything to do with it...?

It’s not related to light, it’s related to over focusing, especially in peripheral vision. Keeping things close to the face keeps things in focus, making the eye thinking it’s over focused, so it grows longer to defocus. It’s called emmetropization and it’s how the eye grows.

Re: Shortsightedness has become an epidemic

#358

Post by abledon »

sandstrom wrote: post #192

For several decades it has been known that myopia (nearsightedness) and intelligence are correlated[1][2]. Initially it was speculated that reading caused nearsightedness, and through that higher intelligence. There is probably some truth to that. But with modern DNA sequencing techniques researches has found genes that seem to affect both[3][4]. The hypothesis is that one (or a set of) genes affects both eye size gr…

> For several decades it has been known that myopia (nearsightedness) and intelligence are correlated[1][2].

Funny, this was also documented in sanskrit medical texts

Re: Shortsightedness has become an epidemic

#359

Post by canjobear »

planarhobbit wrote: post #332
Aulig wrote: post #325

Honestly, myopia is not complicated (Kepler pretty much had it right in 1604 already). There's countless studies showing that axial length (eyeball length) changes in both directions, where elongation increases myopia. How do you change it? You get defocus (blur) which makes the eye adjust in the direction to reduce the blur. Practically: use weaker (around 1.5 diopters) or no glasses during close-up work (reading, c…

Hard to believe after all these years EndMyopia is not only being promoted on HN, but is consistently one of the most upvoted things on the subject. I figured the pros here would slice and dice and find issues with the research and recommendations and explain in depth why it’s snake oil (if it is), but it’s been a fairly forgiving topic.

There was some good discussion with experts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31360653

Re: Shortsightedness has become an epidemic

#360

Post by andrepd »

ekianjo wrote: post #136
andrepd wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the dictionary this is a valid use of the word 'epidemic'. It's also probably the best word to convey what is happening to a general audience.

> According to the dictionary this is a valid use of the word 'epidemic'. That's circular logic because dictionaries keep changing their definition to match what ignorant people use.

>definition matches what people use

That is indeed how this "language" thing works.

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