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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

> For schoolkids it's probably even bigger. They don't even know that their eyesight might not be just like every other kid.

This is definitely true. I got my first pair of glasses at 7, and I hadn't realised I needed them. Luckily my mum is also short sighted and she noticed me straining to see things.

Also interesting: my eyes worsened to my current prescription of around -4 relatively quickly over the next 4-5 years. But I only started wearing my glasses full time when my optician mentioned that he was amazed that I didn't. Until that time I'd been quite happy wandering around with blurry vision most of the time. Kids truly are very adaptable.

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There's now a treatment using low-concentration atropine eye drops to more-or-less stop the further deteriorating of the eyes (at least for near-sightedness).

Our ophthalmologist told us about this when we took our oldest there after noticing she had some issues in seeing things properly from a distance. Since my wife and myself have on average -8 we were keeping an eye out (ha!) on our kids for any signs of vision issues.

Basically every night before bed you put a drop in each eye and keep this up for as long as they're still growing. If you can start early enough this means they can end up with e.g. -1.5 or -2 instead of regressing all the way to e.g. -8.5 like me. Definitely a quality-of-life improvement, less chance of other eye issues later on, reduced cost of glasses and easier treatment with a laser to get back to 0 in case they want that.

It's fairly new, at least here in Europe, so not all doctors are familiar with it. Same for pharmacists: they need to prepare these eye drops themselves since they are not available directly from a manufacturer in this low concentration.

How does this compare with corneal moulding?

I had my first set of glasses at 7. I was diagnosed with myopia, -1.5 and went to get some glasses done. I hated the glasses and my parents insisted I wear them, but I could not frigging see with them and kept saying I have blurry vision with them. High source of friction with my parents. 1 year passes and we visit the optician again, it turns out the glasses were +1.5 - no wonder they were useless to me.

My vision for much of my first 30 years straddled the line where I could get a driver's license that said I didn't need glasses¹ although I started wearing glasses in kindergarten. I was pretty inconsistent about glasses wearing for a lot of that time, but now, my vision has deteriorated to the point where I need glasses for both near and far correction—I've had progressive lenses for almost a decade now.

1. More precisely, I didn't need glasses in California. In Illinois, I did—I got my first CA driver's license in 1990, replacing an IL driver's license. Then I moved back to IL in 1997, then back to CA in 2004, and back to IL in 2011². All my IL licenses required me to drive with glasses.

2. If the pattern held, I'd have moved back to Los Angeles in 2018, but it appears I'm in Chicago until I retire.

>Luckily my mum is also short sighted and she noticed me straining to see things.

My parents just kept scolding me for sitting too close to the TV. I had to ask for them on many occasions and eventually got them to get me tested. It had got so bad that I couldn't read anything written on the blackboard for a long while.

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