Nearsightedness is at epidemic levels – and the problem begins in childhood
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
That’s the first time I’ve heard of that, so I clicked the link. It’s a fascinating, and rather distressing, study in chickens, that does not say what the article claims at all.
There is an actual, properly tested (in humans!) childhood intervention that is effective, though: low dose atropine. I’m surprised it wasn’t mentioned. https://www.aao.org/eyenet/article/how-to-use-low-dose-atrop...
In fact the time where it slowed down getting worse was coincidentally the time where my daily near work went from 2-3 hours to 8+ hours as I was doing it professionally and not just in my free time.
Now I have glasses with +1 ADD power that help greatly, and can comfortably read tiny fonts on my phone screen again.
I've given up hope on getting LASIK or similar surgery, and am now just starting to get age related farsighted as well. A few more years and I'll be needing bifocals :/
It's horrible to use bifocals on a computer screen, you can only see sharp on a small horizontal band. You have to tilt the head to see the rest.
Corrective lenses definitely slow the degradation and improve daily quality of life, but unfortunately the rate of degradation does not reach zero.
And how do we know that? I mean, that an eye doctor would rather prescribe glasses than not, it's not surprising. The fact that they'd back up their choice by some "scientific" explanation, is only natural.
Let me offer the opposing view in the form of an example: I have been diagnosed with mild miopia (-0.5), and prescribed glasses. I did wear the glasses for a few months but at some point I lost them, and didn't go back for a replacement. Now about 20 years later, I have never again wear glasses or any other correction and I don't need them (I can read the small leters on the vision tests. I would not say that my vision is 100%, but I never need glasses to see the things in the distance). If anything, my vision improved without wearing correction!
Because my sight is getting slowly but progressively worse each time I go in for eye exams to check if my glasses are still sufficient, but not as quickly as when I first had to get glasses in the first place.
That is normal and expected. I have never heard anyone claim that glasses prevent the progression of myopia. They obviously do not.
There is a theory going around that myopia is caused by insufficient exposure to sunlight, which seems highly plausible to me.
The article seems to claim that:
>Fortunately, just a few minutes a day with glasses or contact lenses that correct for blur stops the progression of myopia, which is why early vision testing and vision correction are important to limit the development of myopia. Eye checks for children are mandatory in some countries, such as the U.K. and now China, as well as most U.S. states.
That is nonsense. Tests are free for children, but my daughter only gets a test if I book one.
Wonder how they figured out it helped with myopia in kids…
My kid's in a Steiner preschool and they start the day with two hours or so in outdoor play. That oughta do the trick. Plenty of far focus.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/low-dose-atrop...
> After the treatment period, and 6 months after treatment stopped, there were no significant differences between the groups in terms of changes in degree of myopia compared with baseline. Nor were there significant differences in axial length within the two groups when compared with baseline measurements.
This implies essentially nothing about the efficacy of atropine — it actually means “if there was an effect, then the study was underpowered for the size of the effect or otherwise failed to detect it.” One could quantify the degree to which the study actually suggests that the treatment didn’t work, but the authors did not do that.
I, too, can fail to detect a benefit to low-dose atropine. Hey, look, I just enrolled 0 subjects and didn’t confirm the effect. So it wasn’t “significant!” But I obviously showed nothing at all.
Looking at the actual summary in the linked paper’s results section, and doing no real math, it does look like it genuinely contradicts the idea that low-dose atropine is as effective as previous studies seem to suggest, which is interesting. But that’s not what the authors, or the NIH summary, wrote!
The thing is everyone looking for is prevention now, because you don't want to have the retinal detachment risk.
I've been suffering from presbyopia for some years (I'm 41 now, and it seemed to start getting pretty bad around 38 or so). My eyes also often feel dry, itchy, and half-closed. I have floaters in my left eye. If I open both of my eyes very wide, and cover only my left eye with my hand, the problem becomes much less severe.
When I went to an eye doctor, they used a drug, placed in eye drops, to force my pupils to dilate, which I gather is typical.
Not only did these drops provide fast-acting relief from the feelings of dryness and itchiness, but my vision also improved markedly for about a day and a half afterward.
I reported this to the doctor via a phone call, but they either didn't seem to believe me, or didn't seem to care.
I haven't found a solution yet, but I do wish that those drops were commercially available for me to use for experimentation.
The doctor also warned to stay away from eye drops that has any sort of preservatives, it reacts with the tear fluid and gets almost like sand corns in the eyes.
Also, find a real eye doctor...
That's pretty old-school considering that after WWII, seeding industrial areas in Germany with nuclear mines was being considered, and the plan had chickens supplying body heat to prevent the detonators from freezing over in winter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Peacock#Chicken-powered_n...
That isn't a great proposition. Think better.
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).
(This is a repost of my comment from 3 years ago on the same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25909557 )
Sure, if you live in Australia with a tiny population living in own houses (while they can still afford those), they risk UV-burns more than myopia. But that doesn't scale that great.
Indoor, try Sylvania TruWave LED (2700K, high CRI, low flicker, high lumens), https://gembared.com/blogs/musings/the-best-daytime-white-li...
I’m typing this from a cafe in Manhattan, I try to walk at least a few km every morning. I did the same thing when I lived in Seattle. My understanding is you don’t need direct Australia-level sun to get the benefits we’re talking about.
> There is a small neural network on the retina that tries to detect if the eye is far-sighted (most people are born far-sighted), and it is producing dopamine to slow or increase eye growth rate. It is not very smart, and if you do a lot of near-work it can think you are still hyperopic, causing further myopia progression. So, based on the refractive properties of the eye the software calculates the signal that would convince the retinal neural network that the eye is long enough, so it would produce dopamine, a known signal to stop axial eye growth. (based on myopic defocus LCA from the papers[2][3])
Refractify is the worlds first software to apply myopic defocus effect on the screen. Pre-clinical studies suggest that it may slow the progression of myopia or even prevent it. This makes the screen look on the retina naturally as if it was at a greater distance. This is possible because there are slight detectable differences in the statistical properties of the light depending on how far it is coming from due to Longitudinal Chromatic Aberration(LCA) and other effects. LCA simulation is being used in computer graphics since at least 2017 to enhance depth perception, but only recently has it gained research interest for its myopia prevention properties.
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00144...
Does this mean we should let our eyes see blurred images so our eyes would feel like they are seeing far away stuff and stop axial eye growth to stop myopia. This is in direct contrast to the claim in the post
> a few minutes a day with glasses or contact lenses that correct for blur stops the progression of myopia
which believes corrective lenses that correct for blur would stop the progression of myopia.
> Here we show that, even though filtered movies looked similar, eyes became significantly shorter when the movie was sharp in the red plane but became longer when it was presented sharp in the blue plane. Strikingly, the eyes of young subjects who were already myopic did not respond at all—showing that their retina could no longer decode the sign of defocus based on LCA. Our findings resolve a long-standing question as to how the human retina detects the sign of defocus. It also suggests a new non-invasive strategy to inhibit early myopia development: keeping the red image plane on a computer screen sharp but low pass filtering the blue.
I wonder if doing the same to TVs and tablets will do anything.
> Some myopia control techniques work similarly, like MiSight and Hoya lenses.
MiSight is a contact lens used to slow myopia progression in children, aged 8-12 at the initiation of treatment.
If you have myopia, your life experience is already ruined, and it's not very much relevant whether it's -2 or -6. You're stuck with glasses either way so why bother "slowing it". Yes you can get retinal detachment but on average you won't.
I'm not even sure I can be bothered to spend effort on "slowing myopia progression" in my children by annoying treatments such as contact lenses or applying topical chicken guano, unless there are serious concerns. If you already have myopia just live with it. I would love for them to not have any myopia at all and perfect vision, though. Just very unlikely provided that basically everybody in my family wears glasses.
The global optical business is on the order of $100B in annual revenue.
Reversing or preventing myopia has less economic support, but research continues.
> it's not very much relevant whether it's -2 or -6
Smaller corrections can use CR-39 or even glass, with high optical quality. Lenses for larger myopia corrections become too thick with CR-39 material, requiring "high index" plastics. These have more cost and optical distortion. Smaller corrections are also more amenable to contact lenses.
1) extended depth of field with a smaller pupil in bright sunlight (smaller aperture) that keeps objects at a wider range in focus
2) biochemical cascade responding to certain wavelengths in sunlight that produce a “stop growth” signal in the retina
Hence the 20:20:20 guideline that says after 20 mins of near work, one should spend at least 20 seconds looking at an object 20 feet away. The same principle applies to extended contraction of your arm, core, eye or other muscles.
I get why people study this sort of thing and why it's useful. The thing that I don't understand is why people need studies to tell them they should skip desert, leave the phone on the counter, go outside, and ask your neighbor how they're doing.
As an aside, I was born nearsighted as well. /shrug
> We've known for all of history that...
I don't want to go too far into the epistemological weeds here, but we've also known that the earth was the center of the solar system and that many health problems are caused by an imbalance of the humors.
This, IMO, is why WFH is a bad thing and should be avoided.
But here we go again with a rehashed debate.
yes WFH bad. Drive 3 hours to sit in a cube instead with 1/6th the space of your room at home.
Sadly, America’s backwards zoning policies have led to a situation where nothing is typically near anything else. But hey, at least people can have huge front yards that they never ever, use for anything! That’s something!
It's much easier for people who already own a place in the city.
No thank you.
It would blow my mind to see people in Bentleys on my commute. Hard for me to imagine having enough money for such a car and not deciding to avoid the inhumane agony of forced commute.
Given driving time and train time, it's easily 2 hours of a commute in any of the top 20 metros for the majority of the population. From personal experience: Seattle, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, Orange County (just Santa Ana to Irvine!), or the rest of the inland empire was all 1.5 or more, each way. Ofc there will be less general cases around the nation, where you might characterize a "very small minority" opposed to what I would believe was 1/3 of the nation doing 2 hours total before WFH was popularized. Some people (including people we each know) still make these commutes.
Do you have less opportunity to sit next to a window you can look out of periodically, when working from home? I'd think not. Less time to take walks outdoors? Nope. For many people, offices are going to be more of a detriment than a help.
In short, as long as hour+ driving commutes are commonplace, WFH shouldn’t be going anywhere.
The main reason most companies used to have offices in large metros is not because they were expensive, but because they offer great access to workers. This became even more important as women's labor participation went up, as moving for one job is stressful, but moving when you have two earners is a real problem.
The main advantage for a company of WFH is opening up the pool of workers even more: I've worked at teams that might as well been UN sumits if you look at just nationalities and locations.
Small, localized offices in lower cost areas do not provide any significant social advantage over home if you don't find at least a handful of people you work with in said office. But if the company is very distributed, this isn't going to happen. So then you have to try to hire people living hear those, lower cost of living offices, which shrinks the available pool again. And if those places had a lot of highly paid workers, they stop being low cost of living anyway.
The only road to shorter commutes (once having an office is taken as mandatory) is massive density and public transport. It doesn't guarantee it, but then there are more people that are technically close enough to the office so that if they worked there, they'd have a short commute. Compare, say, LA and Madrid. LA is bigger, but the number of people that can get to a random point in downtown LA in 30 minutes is far lower than in Madrid.
My main reason is that it is better for families, and it would be kids spend more time with their parents (in the UK it is now common for kids to have breakfast at school, and be picked from after school childcare every day).
With regard to this problem, it would also make commuting a lot easier. The biggest problem I have found with commuting is the crowding at peak times: it makes things slower and less comfortable, and means you cannot get work done on a train, etc. If you had shorter and more flexible working hours people could avoid peak times.
I feel like society generally accepts myopia as something you just get, instead addressing it like a disease that can be prevented. Sure, it's manageable with corrective lenses or surgery, but prevention is so simple. Better education, through articles like this might catalyze some of the changes we need to make to allow a lot of children grow up being able to see things naturally.
it's like diabetes, sure, some people are born with it, but others develop it through lifestyle choices. Except in this case, this effects children, who have very little control over their lives. It's up to adults to help them grow up to be healthy.
This is like a BackEnd engineer saying that he doesn't believe the FrontEnd exists.
We've been studying the FrontEnd for the majority of human history, and while many things we've found are just plain wrong in an objective sense, they still have subjective value.
Case and point: look at how meditation has been receiving continuous affirmation from the scientific community.
Has it?
Most of traditional medicine is quackery, as useful and correct as a broken clock.
There are tons of articles published in journals on it.
As for the quackery, that comes from attempts to discern objective truths. Traditional medicine is terrible for objective truths. But it shines in subjective experience.
Ultimately, you have to try things out and see what affects your subjective experience. You will know by direct experience what is transforming your experience.
If something doesn't work, throw it out.
There are a lot of different ways of meditating, because the brain is complex enough that every person has different predispositions. But ultimately meditation begins by watching your mind so that you can know how it behaves and then testing different things to see how the behavior changes.
But I do like CBT and agree is has the strength you're talking about; it has the rigorousness of scientific research behind it, so its solutions tend to be applicable for larger categories of people.
Science usually throws out anomalies where something only works or doesn't work for a few individuals.
However what I think has helped me is actually observing my negative thoughts or someone questioning those thoughts - in the "so what?" sense. I am worried or having negative thoughts - and there's this idea of "so what?" and reframing it.
I'm scared of failing at something or saying the wrong thing. So what if I fail? This will continue in to further ideas of how the failure might impact my life and "so what's" after that until I can't complain anymore. At certain point I am forced to find my negative thoughts ridiculous.
> As for the quackery, that comes from attempts to discern objective truths. Traditional medicine is terrible for objective truths. But it shines in subjective experience.
If it works it should be testable. A lot of traditional medicine does work, but then it can be incorporated in to medicine. If alternative medicine (traditional or otherwise) works we call it "medicine". If it shines in subjective experience but is not testable, it just sounds like it provides a temporary feel good experience.
I think you're missing the point of optimizing for subjective experience over objective knowledge. The feel good experience is the point. Subjectively, life is like playing a video game; you do what _works_ to have good mental health. Sure it's fun to wonder what the video game's code looks like, but that's not the point of playing the game.
You will never experience the BackEnd of your brain. We can affect it of course, with medication and surgery etc. I take medication for anxiety myself, but I also meditate, and it's the union of FrontEnd behaviors and BackEnd modification that gives you wellbeing.
Also, subjective experience is testable, it's just not testable by anyone but YOU. You try things out and you see how your subjective experience changes.
There are tests we've done (MRIs on meditators) that show the neural correlates of meditation etc, but again that's not the point: You are going to die and all your knowledge will be annihilated, so play the game to have the best life by optimizing your subjective experience of every moment of life.
That doesn't really capture the risk-carrying lifestyle they're highlighting in the article, though.
Spending your days contributing to your community in a safely sheltered school, office, etc as part of a social community and then your home time further learning and socializing indoors, with others, doesn't really look anything like what you described but seems to carry the similar risk here.
While some have an intuition that's already skeptical of that life, many people wouldn't give it a second thought. You're being productive, social, healthy, and maybe even physically active. Doesn't sound too bad! But you're not getting much sunlight, you're not seeing a lot of distant focal points, and you're specifically probably doing a lot of reading and watching -- that's where the increased risk of myopia quietly slips in.
People have all kinds of weird beliefs, and there are entire industries selling quack remedies and therapies that people, willingly and unwillingly, buy into.
Sure it won't reach everyone, but it might reach some people who genuinely thought their previous beliefs and behaviors were "correct".
I like dessert, have a normal BMI, and don't have diabetes. That being said, desserts like stewed fruit and yoghurt are not representative of what the average person is eating, and any unnecessary food is going to make problems with excess weight worse.
I don't want to. I want them to find a different solution.
And eventually they do. The solution isn't skipping dessert, but rather Ozempic.
But that behaviour must have driven the myopia, because I later learned that they'd leave me on purpose, so I'd not cry so much.
Then I was bullied a lot, so security was always on the paper in front of me, good reason to not look up, lol.
Obviously the eye, like every other body part, is subject to Selye adaptation. The correct treatment is clearly a training stimulus that reverses the myopia, not one that reinforces it.
Personally, my myopia stopped progressing when I stopped letting the eye doctor update my prescription. The reason, again obviously, is because my eyes are trained with constant close up work, but vision exams assume I spend my time looking at objects 20 feet away.
It would be nice to find an optometrist willing to work with me on reversing my myopia with a prescription suitable for my daily activities, but the ones I’ve talked to all have thoroughly calcified on the subject.
High-quality and affordable glasses can be purchased online without a prescription.
EyeBuyDirect (US) and Clearly.ca (Canada) are owned by EssilorLuxottica, global optical behemoth.
So, all the disney/cartoon characters with BIG eyes are myopic?
(Joking aside, is there any correlation between large eyes and myopia?)
To my memory, I played outside as a kid and had perfect vision. I didn't have access to a television growing up. I grew, my skull changed, my eye size changed, so my vision got blurry in 1st grade. I was (suddenly) very nearsighted. The teacher noticed, so they put glasses on me. The controversial claim: it is normal for eyesight to change during childhood and in adolescence and glasses may lock in a child's myopia.
Now I'm sure genes and environment, television and computer use, food quality, etc play a big role (my father also wears (weaker) glasses, and we were always low-income / made poor dietary decisions), but if it's the case that eyesight strength is malleable to some extent (with exercise, with playing outside in sunlight vs looking at television), and if it's the case that the epidemic outstrips genetic variance here over this timeline (surely?), I'd bet good money that slapping lenses on a kid during developmental years is as bad as giving a kid a tablet, moreso than one's genes.
I find it interesting that sometimes -my brain- can make out what faraway text reads as is but it is apparently -blurry- to my eyes. Like a blindsight phenomenon? Like the mechanics of sight, the muscle apparatus, etc is weak and underdeveloped (or developed to compensate for glasses), but the brain unhindered by developmental obstruction is doing the 'seeing'. Totally subjective, probably wrong.
Curious what folks might think in countries with traditional Hanzi / Kanji script might think. Are they really seeing what they read? How about their elders? How is it the case that after many years of reading such incredibly small script old folks retain their eyesight, but suddenly their children's children cannot (over a comparatively smaller span of time)? The answer is pretty obviously technology / environmental differences in each generation's developmental years. Why weren't those old folks also screwed? Well they didn't write / read at a young age -> no need for glasses for them early on.
This epidemic is occluded by the advent of the LCD screen, but not directly caused. What if glasses themselves and an increased effort to get kids glasses is playing a role in developing a myopia epidemic?
EDIT: haha, ok, one (unintended, misconstrued) reading of the actual article is "we put cute helmets and lenses on chickens at development and look how we messed up their eyeballs."
Our bodies are much better at adapting to our environments than we realize. There are parallels with soft modern diets and jaws and teeth that don't receive enough stimulus to develop properly. We're only starting to understand the burden of man-made disease.
Slow and often expensive vision therapy for myopia helps some people, but not everyone, possibly due to genetic and neuroplasticity differences, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Nevertheless, many VT principles can help children whose eyes and brains are still developing. COVD, the professional association has existed for 40 years, https://www.covd.org/page/About_Us
The College of Optometrists in Vision Development (COVD) is a non-profit, international membership association of eye care professionals including optometrists, optometry students, and vision therapists. Established in 1970, COVD provides board certification for optometrists and vision therapists who are prepared to offer state-of-the-art services in Behavioral and developmental vision care, Vision therapy, Neuro-optometric rehabilitation.
Been a few years since I read endmyopia - didn’t realize there was so much drama going on.
Anyhow it's about 15 years since and my diopters haven't changed. Also I never use the glasses when up close (ex: reading a book or watching something on my phone). I do use them when at my computer since the monitor is a bit too far to read comfortably. And outside, only if I drive and need to see very clear what's in front. Otherwise no glasses and they bother me: sure, things are a little blurry far away but I'm used to that.
Overall: my myopia is stable and don't know if it's genetic or by the habit of wearing glasses only when absolutely necessary and using the naked eye otherwise.
Which gets me thinking to ... dental care. I'm 46 and have all my teeth, sure some may have some incipient cavities. But some 20+ years ago I went to a dentist and he basically said "Your teeth are terrible, I basically need to puncture and put a filling in every one of them", to which I said "Thanks, I'll think about it" in loud voice and "Yeah, right" in mental one and left. Went to another dentist (a woman this time) and she said "I'll be honest. There are some incipient cavities but it'll do more harm than good breaking the tooth enamel and putting a filling at this point. Monitor them and when they progress, come back". They haven't progressed much in 20 years so again I don't know: would 17 fillings (a figure of style for "many, many fillings") would have helped more over the course of 20 years?
No. If they're not progressing, there is no problem to solve.
Dental sealant might be worthwhile.
1. spending a lot of times on screens means the eye only focusses at objects at a very close distance most of the time, this seems to cause eye strain which is why for adults working with screens the recommendation is to focus on objects in the distance every now and then
2. sunlight somehow (the exact mechanism seems to be unclear) contributes to the development of eye shape in children, in other words a lack of sunlight can cause the eye shape not to adjust as the body growth, impairing eyesight and causing myopia
The effect of 1 seems to be minute compared to 2 and the latter can be solved by literally just spending time outside. Putting your toddler outside to watch their iPad seems to be literally better for eye sight than taking the iPad away but keeping them inside. Of course the ideal solution would be having the kid outside without the iPad but if it's a choice between the two, getting them outside is the more important focus - and it's often the easier one too.
The solution is more sunlight during childhood and early adult years. It seems that sunlight is an important signal when it comes to eye growth and shape development.
This has been confirmed for at least a decade.
No need for any particular supplement or food or anything. Literally just go outside for 30 min to 2 hours (can't remember the recommendation).
Kids need recess back.
Kids can go out front and stand there. And that's what they can do.
In FL they can do that in ~100° + ~100% humidity. School is out all summer to allow that. During not-summer months, kids have schools to keep them safely away from any not-awful weather. Because crops or something.
Not really, or at least not yet. In the future perhaps VR/AR devices can provide a flexible focal distance, for eye health.
I find it a relief that with the Vision Pro I don't need reading glasses. I can even "focus" closer than I could before I needed those darned things. Just a couple inches or so from my nose. Would be nice to also keep my eye's lenses focused at distance. The VR/AR separation of lens and stereoscopic focus is interesting.
In case any of you look at something close up all day, and want to make it appear further away.
[1] https://sleepopolis.com/news/children-night-lights-cause-myo...
[2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/03/000309074442.h...
[3] https://news.osu.edu/night-lights-dont-lead-to-nearsightedne...
This stinks of faulty logic.
But height is not affected by the environment in any meaningful way in a modern first-world context; everyone's diet is already maxed out.
I suffer from horrible myopia. I've been an indoorsy bookworm and techie for most of my life and had my first pair of glasses at age 9. Now that I'm almost 50, my eyes are atrocious.
"Spending time outdoors" is a pre-computers anachronism. You're better off hoping for cybernetic eye implants.
We will stop fighting myopia and start fighting ticks and mosquitoes, I guess...
Go to school just as the sun’s coming up -> inside recess because it’s too cold or it’s raining a little -> sunset around 5:00PM.
Schools get kids five days a week for most of the winter, so as parents it’s damn hard to get them outside much while the sun’s up on those days if the schools won’t do it consistently. And you need lots of time in very-bright light to cut your odds of myopia to something very low.
Maybe they are not talking about you personally. There seems to be strong evidence for time outside being a contributing factor, as one example. That doesn't automatically discount your personal experience, but at the same time any HN reader is well aware the label placed on data from one's personal experience.
--
A guy who also has probably been near-sighted since birth
Then with glasses: "You mean everybody sees like this!?"
So I was already nearsighted when I still cared about climbing trees and trampolines etc., the books and computers phase came later.
If you're vitamin d deficient, that means you're not spending time outdoors (in the sun).
If you're not spending time outdoors, it probably means you're focusing your vision on short-distance objects, like screens and books. Which naturally leads to myopia for most people.
Obviously, vitamin D supplementation is highly unlikely to do anything to improve the condition, because vitamin D deficiency is just a symptom.
Similarly seasonal affective disorder is also very rarely improved by vitamin D supplementation alone.
I disagree. The environmental causes of myopia are very well understood, and have been an area of research for decades and the treatments have been known for nearly as long. Exposure to sunlight at an early age will reduce prevalence of myopia.
They are not saying it's the only cause of myopia. There are people with congenital myopia, such as yourself. But the the bulk of myopia cases are not congenital, they are developed. This is why myopia prevalence increases as a country industrializes, and children spend more time indoors.
The eyes need to use auto focus mechanisms to tune growth rates to correct for this. If something goes wrong you end up with vision problems.
The brain isn't born able to process visual images and needs training data. If the input from one eye is much inferior during learning image fusion it's input is just discarded and you end up with a lazy eye.