As one meta-analysis put it:
It’s estimated that an increase of one hour per day of outdoor time could reduce the occurrence of myopia in children by 45%.
Make sure your kids spend time outside, folks!
One hour of outdoor time per day is not a modest increase
For some people it is
Good try child sports teams. I ain’t touching that grass unless you make me.
Near-sightedness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myopia says that both terms exist in English? Not a native speaker; I think I have seen “nearsightedness” more often in English but my first language’s term for it translates to “shortsightedness”. 🤷♂️
IDK why it would say that, I’m a native speaker and the two terms have different meanings. Short-sightedness refers to not planning for long-term problems.
Edit: looking at what comes up in search, I see it showing up that way. I guess words change if we use them incorrectly for long enough. I’d be awfully confused if someone started talking about my short-sightedness as anything other than a flaw in my problem-solving abilities.
I guess words change if we use them incorrectly for long enough.
Looking at the etymology, it appears that short sighted started as the medical term, with it’s relation to foresight coming later. It’s also older than nearsighted.
It may be less common in modern contexts, but it’s definitely a “correct” use.
Also: all words are made up and the points don’t matter.
ok, “Kurzsichtigkeit” in German definitely has both meanings without this causing confusion in practice
Both terms depend on context. If you talk about someone’s myopic or short sighted plan to earn money you know they’re referring to a CEO.
Removed by mod
I was outside a ton when I was younger and I still have myopia. These things happen.
You might have had a higher degree of myopia if you hadn’t spent all that time outdoors.
True, but I am like -2 or -3 in both eyes, so my myopia isn’t great either lol
Not great, but it’s also not -12 😀
did not seem to help me. I guess I got the bad side of the coin flip.
Is this really causation though? Could it not just be that kids that spend less time looking at screens are less likely to be short-sighted AND more likely to spend time outside?
It wasn’t mentioned in this article, but I remember reading somewhere that it might be because exposure to sunlight affects vitamin D production, which affects the length/shape of our eyeballs as we’re growing up.
Another idea is that when you’re outside, you spend more time focusing on objects further away, which helps develop those eye muscles
I’ve seen that too, with some emphasis put on viewing the horizon… though where I grew up it’s very unlikely to see anything close to horizon-distance without being at a beach (mostly because trees… better than indoors sure but not much non-treetop distance to look at unless you’re looking across a field/farmland, or maybe a radio/water tower or something).
though where I grew up it’s very unlikely to see anything close to horizon-distance without being at a beach
It would be interesting to see if people who live im these sorts of areas have higher rates of myopia. I’m not aware of any data that’s been collected on this though
A third idea is that sunlight is much, much brighter than most indoor artificial light, and the lack of this very bright light causes some sort of problem for the developing eye. Maybe the brightness of the sun is a sort of “calibration” method for the eye and when it doesn’t get that really bright sunlight, the development of the eye goes out of whack.
So is it vitamin D, or far-away views or bright sunlight? I’ve heard all these theories before but I’m not sure which is it. Does the meta analysis say anything about which effect is most likely the cause? I mean could we “fix” this by going outside to view things far away, or should we just take vitamin D supplements, or should we have much brighter indoor lighting? I’d love to know.
A third idea is that sunlight is much, much brighter than most indoor artificial light
Would this mean it’s a bad idea to give kids sunglasses?
Does the meta analysis say anything about which effect is most likely the cause?
Not that I saw though I admit I didn’t read the whole thing
Would this mean it’s a bad idea to give kids sunglasses?
Well if that is actually the causing effect, yes. I checked the paper and they do actually mention light brightness as a potential cause, as well as the other things but they have nothing on what actually causes the problem for real.
But I mean, clearly we aren’t naturally meant to need sunglasses so in a way I’d say yea, don’t give your kids sunglasses.
If this is just a correlation this would have to be a correlation at the population level. Countries where kids start school later on (e.g. 7 years old) have significantly lower rates of myopia than countries that start school early on in a child’s development (e.g. 3 years old). It’s still possible that this is a correlation, but the correlation would have to be capturing something deeper than just an individual kids screen time. Granted, this correlation would still need to account for differences between individual kids, but it would also need to account for differences between kids at a population level. It’s hard to see what could be causing this correlation though. So maybe there’s something there we’re just not seeing, but at a certain point though the idea that there is a causal relationship starts to seem like the most plausible explanation for explaining this data
if you want sad but unfortunate proof, read about the case of genie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)?wprov=sfla1
the relevant bit here is that when she was taken out of the room she was kept in till age 13, her eyes were literally unable to focus on anything more than 10 feet away (as that was the size of the room she was kept in). imo that shows that being outside where objects tend to be farther away at a young age helps train your eyes to do so in the future.
If you get this type of short sight vision, you can train your eyes to get the vision back as this is caused by the eyes strength.
But if you have the type that has to do with your eye shape going outside will do nothing, and you can exercise it away
You need to read better. It says it reduces occurrence of myopia in a population not that it cures myopia when an individual gets it.
Sure if you have very mild short term myopia caused by eye straining you can get vision back by training your eye. But with kids it’s about how the eye develops when it’s still growing. When kids eyes grow too fast they grow less spherical and that is what causes myopia and that is the kind that you can never cure. Going outside means kids are getting more sunlight in their eye which will slow down the growth and thus their eyes will grow more spherical which means they don’t develop myopia. Playing outside won’t cure myopia but it will reduce the chance of developing it in children.
Yes, I spent 6 months in ICU in 2014, I had a lot of eye issues while I was there not related to my reason for my stay (bilateral lung transplant) but as side effects of procedures and meds but I also basically lost my depth perception unless it was directly in front of me. Living in a 10x10 room for half a year with no far away distances to observe made my eyes weak, it took about six months after I got home to get my full depth prescription back. Indoors just makes your eyes weak, mine is an extreme example, but it doesn’t permanently ruin them.
Ysk 0*infinity = 0
If you spend no time doing anything that you ought to do (exercise, go outside, eat healthy) the immediately observable effects from any amount of sustained practice is measurable.
I’m farsighted, so I can only conclude that I spent too much time outdoors as a kid. See Mom!?
I admit that I barely skimmed the article so I don’t know if/how they controlled for this
But this also kind of feels to me like something that could go the other way- myopic kids are less likely to go outside
Get hit in the head by a baseball you didn’t see coming or trip over a rock you didn’t see a handful of times and you might decide that the “outdoors” thing isn’t really for you.
Or of course a mix of both factors, kids who are already predisposed to short-sightedness go outside less, so the other factors at play make their eyes even worse and so they go outside even less and…
But this also kind of feels to me like something that could go the other way- myopic kids are less likely to go outside
It’s not just individual kids they are measuring, but entire populations of children and at what age they start school. The younger kids are when they start school, the more likely they are to be myopic, and this contributes to significant differences in the prevalence in myopia across countries (Edit: I should have stated this explicitly, but this is because more time in school means less time outside, generally speaking)
Hold up now. I grew up in the 80s when we spent the whole day outside, and I wore thick ass lenses all through grade school.
Yeah, I always had terrible eyesight, and I probably spent more time outside than inside. There was nothing fun happening in the house. ALL the fun was outside.
“Reduces chances” does not mean “prevents”
irrelevant because the term used here was “odds”, not chances
smfh
Uh OK same reply
damn people on Lemmy don’t like sarcasm huh
Oh good one
We spent so much time outside we developed near sightedness instead
You should have “spend” the day outdoors not “spent”.
No. Spent is the past tense of spend.
They edited the title.
How do some people despite being wrong are happy to correct others? And they have up votes? Wtf…
My comment only makes sense with the original misspelled title of the post.
I see, my apologies then
I was outside a lot and still got myopia :3
Congrats on the luck
N=1
Then you were likely genetically predetermined to be at least a little myopic, but if you spent less time outside during your developmental phases you would likely be even more nearsighted than you are now.
Same for me, I spent most of my free time as a child playing outside. I grew up in California, weather wasn’t a concern, I was outside year-'round. I got my first pair of glasses at age 21. I suspect it’s far more genetic than environmental.
It’s both. You can just look at the statistics, the number of people with myopia has gone up over the last few decades. If it was just genetics those numbers would have been stable.
Well, unless nearsighted people were outcompeting people with 20:20 vision, for some reason.
N=1
LMFAO
My mom blamed us (me and my older brother) for “sitting too close to the TV”
She kept us mostly locked indoors in an apartment (besides going to school) from the beginning of my memory up till 8 years old.
Then we moved to the US and from 8 to 12 I was in school from morning (like 7 AM maybe? forgot the exact time) till like 6PM cuz she signed me up afterschool programs cuz she wanted to use it as free babysitting essentially so she can work longer…
And we cant go outside alone without adults.
In China it was “a lot of kidnappers on the street thay will traffic you and sell your organs”
In the US it was “if you go outside without an adult, CPS will take you away and you can’t see mama again” (idk why mom spoke in 3rd person sometimes lol)
Yay! so… from birth to 12 I was indoors, either in school or at home, most of the time…
outdoor time was rare and only when parents have a day off or like the 15 minutes of recess in school…
that’s basically our outside time…
In China we had maternal grandma that sometimes took us outside…
In the US, it was just mom, dad, older brother, and me (cuz grandma can’t come yet, no visa yet)… So we had even less outside time… like parenrs had to work all the time…
But of course its always “too much screens!” to be blamed lmao
From 8 to 12 was when my nearsightedness really developed a lot.
I didn’t understand why I had nearsigntedness at the time, but now looking back and analyzing my life, now it’s so obvious why lol…
My older brother has like -9.00 or -10.00 in the nearsightedness thing. Its funny my parents called it like 900 or 1000 “degrees”… like it sounds so much scarier when they drop the decimal point and literally say: “you’re about to have ONE THOUSAND DEGREES IN NEARSIGHTEDNESS! You’re gonna GO BLIND!”
YSK: The word is ‘spent’ not ‘spend’.
Yeah that was a typo. Edited the title to fix it, should be correct now
well, i can concur. my eyes have trouble adjusting to looking into the distance when i have spent hours in front of the screen. they adapt after a few minutes to hours though.
