Youth watch June 2022∣Youth Hong Kong
Growing short-sighted watching the trend by Elaine Morgan
T
he World Health Organization (WHO) reports that myopia in East Asian countries is the highest in the worldwide. Genetics plays its part but the other obvious culprit is screen time. What other consensus is there on causes, prevention and treatment? ● 145 studies covering 2.1 million participants shows that half of the world’s population will be short-sighted (myopic) by 2050. ● That’s a seven-fold increase from 2000 to 2050. ● Recent Hong Kong research shows changes in myopia coincided with less time spent outdoors during the pandemic. ● The daily average for children fell from around 1 hour 15 minutes to around 24 minutes a day ● In parallel, screen time went up from around 2.5 hours a day to around 7 hours a day.
p Myopia in Hong Kong compared
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Hong Kong is a hub for research into causes and prevention and a team at the Chinese University led by Prof Jason Yam has warned about the effect of restricted outdoor activities and intensive near work on myopia progression in school children during the pandemic. Their recent study1 shows the effects of behavioural and lifestyle changes during the pandemic on children’s vision was explored. Seeing the light All participants were part of the Hong Kong Children Eye Study (HKCES), an ongoing study of eye conditions. They had been monitored for around three years before the findings were published. The team’s work shows that a lack of natural light and outdoor activity contributes to short-sightedness, and given present-day habits, even when people are outdoors, they are often staring at a screen.2 The researchers strongly recommend increasing schools’ outdoor curricular activities by government agencies, pointing to the mandatory outdoor time implemented by education authorities in mainland China and Taiwan as part of myopia prevention programmes.
