The Puzzling Rise in Nearsighted Children | Hacker News Reader

The Puzzling Rise in Nearsighted Children

wsj.com

44 pointsKortaggio43 comments

After years of staring at screens at work, an optometrist told me I was shortsighted for life and insisted I buy prescription glasses. I then became a landscape gardener for four years. Guess what? My shortsightedness disappeared, as did my hayfever and weak knees. Now I am back in an office (much much better wages) and my shortsightedness is starting to return. So a combination of aggressive diagnosis and lack of eye exercise.

The article claims it's the lack of sunlight, not the lack of eye exercise.

Lack of sunlight can mean eyestrain, but it also means lack of Vitamin D. Anyone out there giving their kids supplements?

The article's theory is that the mechanism is dopamine.

It's true. The human eye simply wasn't meant to stare at and interpret millions of tiny pixels. It causes strain over time, which leads to nearsightedness. Luckily it's (at least) partially reversable, as you experienced.

The article presents evidence contradicting the strain hypothesis, and presents the sunlight hypothesis instead.

Related article that made the rounds recently: http://www.nature.com/news/the-myopia-boom-1.17120

There are multiple startup ideas in that article.

Yes. Trying to fix myopia by getting children exposed to more sunlight is a bit of a "let them eat single-source organic asparagus" response: it makes would-be social reformers feel good, but it's not a realistic way to reliably give all children the (apparently) minimum three daily hours of 10,000 lux. Getting all children outside for three hours every day is not realistically possible, and wouldn't be pleasant or even desirable for all of them: bad weather, unsafe neighbourhoods, air pollution. In areas with often-overcast conditions and/or short winter[ days](EDIT) it wouldn't even be sufficient. Classrooms that admit more natural light would be great, but they're not a realistic means of getting to 3h × 10,000 lux across the board, if only because replacing almost the entire stock of primary-school classrooms would be a slow and expensive process. The most obvious solution is to rig up classrooms with multiple SAD lights, light-meter them to ensure that every desk gets at least 10,000 lux when the system is on, then run the system for maybe four hours every classroom day.

(Speaking of which, if I was in charge of a minor child I'd go ahead and stick a SAD lamp in its bedroom and leave it on for most of the day.)

>Getting all children outside for three hours every day is not realistically possible, and wouldn't be pleasant or even desirable for all of them: bad weather, unsafe neighbourhoods, air pollution.

i don't understand that. Where do children are supposed to get daily multi-hour physical activity? On the treadmill in the basement? And if children aren't getting such amount of physical activity - that would border on neglect toward their health, physical and emotional. (of course my POV is affected by the fact that i'm a child of 197x-198x when we were "free-range" children back in USSR and from what i heard it was about the same in USA back then)

This is why modern parents are so in love with structured extra-curricular activities like team sports: they're effectively isolated corrals in which "multi-hour physical activity" is encouraged, rather than discouraged.

It's not a matter of whether it's generally desirable for all children to spend three hours outside every day. One problem is whether admonishing parents about it is actually going to make it so for all children. Another problem is whether it's actually possible and safe for all children no matter how desirable it might be in general. A third problem is how the strong the sun actually is while they are outside playing. For five days out of seven in the winter millions of children in northern Europe travel to school around sunrise, get maybe an hour outside during the day, then come home and play football under grey evening skies and sodium lights.

Most Russian children probably don't get 'daily multi-hour physical activity' - here is a study showing self-reported hours of activity: http://eurpub.oxfordjournals.org/content/eurpub/9/3/166.full...

I don't know of any developed country where kids are all getting that much activity, to be honest.

Natural sunlight is the most abundant resource humanity has. If we can't get our kids three hours of it per day, there's something that needs to be fixed with how we treat them.

We can't get it for them, and we can't get it for ourselves. Your average 9-5 worker doesn't get much sunlight either.

You talk as though the kids want three hours of sunlight a day. Why oppress them more than they already are?

I wear glasses. They're painless. Better that than being forced to spend all my time outside.

I'm actually looking to get one of these 10000 lux lamps and use it for myself when working at night.

Anyone know of any research on possible side effects of getting too much sustained light? I plan on having one on pretty much all the time when working with computers.

Don't know of any research about those lamps specifically, but based on research from blue light devices use and what I know about our circadian rhythms, you will probably end up with sleep issues (difficulty falling asleep as well as low quality of sleep)

> Getting all children outside for three hours every day is not realistically possible

Then something is very wrong.

- Walk (or cycle) to school: 10 minutes. - Morning break: 20 minutes. - Lunch: 45-60 minutes. - Afternoon break: 20 minutes. - Walk home from school: 10 minutes.

That's around 2 hours already, and that's structured time at school. Add a sports lesson two or three times a week, and add one hour playing outside after school every day.

In England, break and lunch was outdoors unless it was actually raining. (Very light drizzle doesn't count.) Being inside wasn't allowed until I was 16-17, in 2002.

I read an article in an old New Scientist on this topic, and it said bright light wasn't sufficient -- it had to be combined with open spaces, which let the peripheral vision be in focus at the same time as the core vision.

If you're suggesting that a typical school day in England delivers enough or nearly enough hours of strong-enough sunlight then that seems hard to square with the large increase in myopia right across the developed world, not just Asia (unless one rejects the strong-light hypothesis, of course). If strong light on its own isn't sufficient then of course adding artificial light to classrooms won't be sufficient; but in that case the Yangxi school experiment presumably won't be successful either.

I'm not going quite that far, but I am suggesting it is realistically possible.

Recalling public middle school in Wisconsin:

>Walk (or cycle) to school: 10 minutes

School starts at 7:40a; most days walking between 7:15a and 7:30a; for most of the year that walk is in the dark or the sun is very low and not very bright.

>Morning break: 20 minutes

Never got one of those

>Lunch: 45-60 minutes

Try 20.

>Afternoon break: 20 minutes

Never got one of those

>Walk home from school: 10 minutes.

Figure one extra-curricular with a duration of 1 hour. For most of the year, the walk home for me was 4:00p-4:15p which was entirely dark.

That's a very long day! And unfortunate with the timezone. Here (London), even in December at least morning is in daylight, and hometime is at dusk (well before twilight).

The school next door to my workplace has this schedule (from their website), for 5-11 year olds:

8:45 - children start to arrive 8:55 - children go inside 10:20-10:35 - morning break 12:00-13:10 - lunch 15:15 - hometime! 15:45 - still lots of children playing, parents chatting 16:00 - most have gone by this point, though on a nice sunny day they can easily still be playing and chatting at 17:30.

The nearest school for 12-16 year olds with info on their website do 8:30-15:00, but only have 45 minutes for lunch. My own school had an hour for lunch, but finished at 15:30. These schools don't have an afternoon break.

All the reasons you gave for why it's not possible are situational. It is possible for kids to get three hours of sunlight, either at school or at home by playing outside.

(By the way, who refers to a minor child as "it" anyway?)

It's perfectly possible for many families. But for others it is not so safe and easy, while many others probably just won't do it even if you exhort them to.

(The answer is 'someone who can't edit his comment after the timeout'. But I suppose it can be my daily blow struck for social justice.)

> (By the way, who refers to a minor child as "it" anyway?)

People from the 19th century. I reread E. Nesbit's 5 Children and It a few years ago, and was quite surprised to notice that the 5th child, a baby known to be male, is invariably referred to by the other characters and the narrator with the pronoun "it" (no relation to the It of the title, which is a magical creature).

When I read that book for the first time, either it had been modernized or (more likely) I was in more of a young-child grammar-absorbing mode than a grammar-checking mode.

Elementary schools could have less classroom time and more outside time. Some countries that don't start serious schooling (classroom time, homeword, teaching pre-defined curricula, etc) until ages 7 or 8, do just fine on those standardized tests that compare students around the world. Of course, geography plays a HUGE part in this, but even then, more time outside would still be better.

I wonder, then, if the levels of myopia and SAD/circadian disruption are correlated. The calibration of one's circadian rhythm depends, basically, on getting the same sort of levels of sunlight that cause dopaminergic response.

I have always wondered about this phenomenon. It always just seemed unreasonably coincidental that as soon as we started testing children and could prescribe them glasses, there seemed to be an epidemic. Historical documents never seemed to showcase a perpetual 50%+ nearsightedness epidemic.

Kids should be outside playing, not coding.

Adults, too.

Coding is playing.

Just kidding, of course. One thing I've noticed is that my kids have vastly more homework than I ever had, and homework now starts in kindergarten. There are only so many waking hours in the day.

Can kids do homework outside?

Perhaps. It would require providing a place to do it, and good weather. I live in a locale with a pretty hard winter.

And schools are increasingly moving schoolwork to the distraction box, er, the computer.

Less homework seems like a simpler solution.

I had a lot of homework as well but at some point I pretty much decided "fuck that, I have better things to do" and learned programming instead. My math grades went down a bit but I actually learned something.

I wish I'd learnt the same prior to university.

I did the same, and just started skipping classes and going to the library instead. It made getting a job harder, but I don't regret it one bit.

"If outside was so good why has man spent thousands of years perfecting inside?"

Sheldon Cooper

tablets

Darwinism dwindling

Kids spening too much time on phones, like Chinese got nearsighted spending too much time doing schoolwork.

Use your phone or do your schoolwork outside and your eyes will be fine.

Eh, that's not necessarily true. I've tried reading books outside and spent all my time squinting because the glare of the sun on the paper was so bright.

It's why I love the grey screen of the original Kindle so much. Want to read it outside? You can do that without going blind!

For my phone, though, I can barely see the image on screen if I'm holding it in sunlight. When I've used laptops outside they've had the same problem. LCD screens kind of need to be used in the dark.

No, apparently not. According to the Nature article http://www.nature.com/news/the-myopia-boom-1.17120, close work has been ruled out as a major cause of myopia.

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