Myopia treatment 'smart glasses' from Japan to be sold in Asia(asia.nikkei.com) |
Myopia treatment 'smart glasses' from Japan to be sold in Asia(asia.nikkei.com) |
Anyone know what can cause sudden onset of astigmatism in adulthood? It appeared a couple years ago and seems stable. Not sure over what period it appeared, probably in 3-12 months.
>Anyone know what can cause sudden onset of astigmatism in adulthood? It appeared a couple years ago and seems stable. Not sure over what period it appeared, probably in 3-12 months.
If it was unstable, it could be keratokonus
And all of those details shift over time, too.
Imagine training the brain to see properly, I doubt it will change in adults however.
Even wearing light sunglasses helps tremendously but because of the socially frowned upon nature of wearing shades indoors and the long term effect of opening up the cornea constantly isn't good, it is a bandaid problem.
I look good too in shades and I can't use astigmatism as an excuse similar to how using one's Asperger syndrome diagnosis as a license to be insensitive cannot expect positive societal feedback.
- Pupil dilating eye drops
- Wearing corrective lenses as little as possible
- Wearing glasses with fogged edges/rims
- Reducing the time you hold objects close to your face
The major factor behind all of this is to reduce the over focusing of light on your retina and fovea. The more light that focuses back there, the more your eye is told to grow longer.
Every parent should know this and how it works. And so should your ophthalmologist, most of which are clueless.
You can't, in any way, undo this growth once it's happened. This is terrible reporting.
Like anyone with a visible disability it takes education and time to normalize things, triple-so for those with disabilities that are not immediately presenting.
There are also corresponding glasses, but no smart glasses
Perhaps that causes astigmatism? Perhaps the cornea needs blinking to stay stable?
Side effects = NOTHING. Seriously. The operation is legitimately nothing, super duper quick. You walk into a room and in less than fifteen minutes you walk out with perfect vision. It's unbelievable.
Satisfied? Very much. I now have perfect vision. I still forget sometimes. Like I'll take off my shirt at the end of the night and will be pulling it away as if I had glasses on.
Or I'll even go to take off my glasses when I get in bed and realize I don't have glasses.
I will say...everyone throughout life treated me like a "very smart person"(tm) but now that is less so and I'm starting to think the glasses had something to do with it :D
Before looking into this, I would have guessed 2X or 3X, but would you believe it's actually over 100X!
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).
When my 5yo kid's eye check came back with "he'll need glasses next year", we started strict "hour+ outside play daily" policy. At his next checkup, he had normal vision. Dr was surprised.
7 'shades' brighter and you're already hitting '100x'.
At a given level of adaptation the relation between luminance and perceived lightness is closer to a square root.
But over the course of about 30 minutes there are several different kinds of adaptations (some faster than that) which the eye/brain can make to the current light level, which has an effect of shifting that curve up or down by up to several orders of magnitude.
I used to live almost on the equator. Before adolescence, I would spent most of my time outdoors. Very stable weather so windows were open most of the day (and night). There was often direct sunlight even indoors. We would go to the beach every weekend. I ended up with -5.00 and -5.25
Maybe this would decrease the prevalence, if you are looking at the entire population. But it's not like you, as an individual, will be immune if you just stay outside.
Probability is a strange beast.
This is still a topic with many unknowns, but we have to follow the evidence as much as we can. Evidence should always beat data-free guesses.
So there are optical properties that are affected by bright light, and your eyes respond to that. What the mechanism is for affecting overall focus range of your eye? I would agree that is unstated/unknown.
[1] Which, as a science project, is fun to demonstrate that a pin hole camera doesn't need a lens for this reason.
In other words, there are downsides to being outside in that 1000 times (maybe 10000 times here) brightness. The really annoying thing is that my eyes were buggered from a young age too, despite all that brightness.
So, it's not even an individual correlation but a population-frequency-correlation between populations in different physical environments, which is so even more likely than an individual correlation to represent an effect other than causation in either direction, such as any other environmental (or population-genetic-distribution) difference.
The study was done in Singapore and Malaysia. It looks like an interesting study to do in different regions of the world. e.g Western Europe where it is notably cloudier than Singapore.
It is really, really difficult to find the right spot that reflects "the light in the room" and then to find a threshold to switch on the lights "at the moment I would have done that".
I constantly hesitate between 30 and 100 lx, it is so dependent on the subjective light outside.
Yo, fellow four-eyed geeks.
I noticed that when lying down and looking up in a room with a light source, with my glasses on, if there is a small droplet of water on the lens (say, due to having just cleaned the glasses and not wicked up every last drop), this droplet can bend the light in such a way that when it subsequently hits the cornea and pupa, a perfectly straight, parallel beam of light passes through the vitreous humor right to the retina.
The consequence of this is that all the junk floating in your eye is rendered in "4K clarity" in a circle of light, regardless of whether it is next to the retina, or floating somewhere in the middle.
Imperfections in your cornea or elsewhere are also rendered, making themselves evident.
One thing I have been wondering for a while, and I thought this what it was when I read the title, is, why can't we have zoom lenses with a camera turned inword to the retina applying autofocus algorithms? As I age, I need a different prescription for every 20 cm I push my laptop back, something like this would be very useful.
Anybody knows what happened to this project https://www.core77.com/posts/12220/brilliant-water-based-eye... ?
I couldn't find a study with data, but there are anecdotal guides online (for picking reading glasses) which state that by 60 years old, it's estimated that a person would need about +2.25 diopters in correction. So someone who is around -2 diopters may expect to have roughly perfect vision as they get older.
I always thought normal vision in both eyes was the best. Now you're telling me my myopic eye might be an advantage later in life?
Assuming this device is actually legit (I'm skeptical...), it would need e.g. FDA approval to be used in the USA, correct?
"myopic defocus is already in use in the US with a contact lens, “MiSight® 1 day” by CooperVision, which is U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved to slow the progression of myopia. This product, which uses multifocal contact lens technology, passively stimulates the entire peripheral retina with light myopically defocused by the non-central power of the contact lens. Kubota Glasses technology leverages nanotechnology in its electronic glasses-based device and seeks to reduce the progression of myopia by actively stimulating the retina for shorter periods while maintaining high-quality central vision and not affecting daily activities."
Which seems to indicate the main beneficiaries will be children, to slow the progression of myopia. As it mentions, there are already multi-focal contact lenses used for that purpose.
Since the contacts don't seem to be marketed at adults, I suspect this will be similar.
What's the "nanotechnology" they are using, and how would that relate to the device's function?
I'll see if I can find blockchain and machine learning somewhere in there.
https://gettingstronger.org/2014/08/myopia-a-modern-yet-reve...
It claims that myopia can be cured, just like muscles can be made stronger in a gym.
[0] https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-appr... [1] https://www.aao.org/eyenet/article/how-to-use-low-dose-atrop...
My prescription changes every couple of minutes. But along a predictable curve.
I keep thinking about getting optometrist adjustable lenses hooking it up to motors to automatically shift the lenses. Mechanical is beyond me though.
Since the article is specifically about Japan and Asian markets, I must add this: One may argue that the discrepancy in mainstream scientific conclusions could simply be due to differences in genetics between East Asians and Europeans. This mainstream "myopia can't be cured/prevented" rhetoric has been extremely harmful for approximately 2 billion people on this planet.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12064612
so adults (possibly young adults) do get it
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2020-12-17/kubota-v... [1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201217005811/en/
There needs to be a 'permanently' in there somewhere.
"Through further clinical trials, it is trying to determine how long the effect lasts after the user wears the device, and how many days in total the user must wear the device to achieve a permanent correction for nearsightedness."
"Eyeglasses" are considered corrective lenses in US (at least) usage (because they correct the distortion of the body's lens).
I’ve always had perfect vision but my dominant eye degraded slightly over the years so I looked into how to bring it back to full. No one in family wears glasses or anything like that, although the elderly use reading glasses of course.
Practicing reading on both monitor and in front of a book with the good eye palmed and trying to shift the focus back and forth while gunning for more clarity for a longer period of time, it took me very little to get rid of the issue - I must have practiced probably 30 times of a few minutes each over the span of a few months, so maybe once every 2nd or 3rd day as I felt like it. I went from having a hard time reading the numbers and letters to very carefully observing the edges of fonts rendered by ClearType antialiasing on Windows.
At first the eye muscles got strained from me forcing it to focus, but then it got better. Minor soreness and redness at first is nothing to be concerned about IMHO. I still practice but not as often, since I’ve trained the ability to focus at will which is really what active focus is about from my understanding - intentional focusing with enough speed.
I’m not a big fan of EndMyopia but the subreddit has people claiming they fixed far worse problems than I have (if slight blurryness is even worthy being called a problem).
I highly recommend Todd Becker’s presentation on Active Focus for anyone wanting a breakdown of the approach. Some people seem to have a hard time with being able to finely control where their focal plane is. It gets easier with practice is about all I can say.
The full “method” that Todd Becker and EM recommend is to try to keep distance to whatever that you’re reading so that it’s just slightly out of focus, but I haven’t had that severe of a myopia. From time to time I read sites like HN from slightly further away than usual just to provide a bit of a challenge to the focus practice, but I think long term it probably isn’t healthy to try to read HN at normal font size from across the room.
Kubota Glasses technology works to reduce the increase in axial length associated with myopia by projecting myopically-defocused virtual images generated using micro-LEDS on the peripheral visual field to actively stimulate the retina. Passive stimulation using myopic defocus is already in use in the US with a contact lens, “MiSight^® 1 day” by CooperVision, which is U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved to slow the progression of myopia. This product, which uses multifocal contact lens technology, passively stimulates the entire peripheral retina with light myopically defocused by the non-central power of the contact lens. Kubota Glasses technology leverages nanotechnology in its electronic glasses-based device and seeks to reduce the progression of myopia by actively stimulating the retina for shorter periods while maintaining high-quality central vision and not affecting daily activities.
Anecdotally, among a bunch of my friends who are (a) nearsighted, and (b) mad about sailing ships, spending a couple of weeks out at sea staring at the horizon will make a significant temporary difference to their myopia.
I’ve been in this Facebook group for a while and lots of people have great personal anecdata about their improvements. It’s really interesting to see a medical device come out and if they have clinical trials to back it up.
My point is for some people it can fix itself naturally, so unless studies are double blind, anecdotal claims should be taken with a grain of salt.
Basically, if you wear goggles that distort your vision for long enough, your visual processing adapts and "corrects" for the distortion such that you can function normally. Then if you remove the goggles your brain still tries to correct for the distortion that isn't there (for a while at least), so the world appears distorted without the glasses.
This is a myth widespread among opticians and optometrists. I have discussed it with those who treated me and not a single one could provide any evidence.
Causes intense pain to use both eyes.
This is something that has been studied pretty extensively. If it was actually a cure, it'd have been well-proven by now, and we'd all be doing it.
You really should exercise your eyes once in a while if you're staring at a screen all day, though.
Untrue and faulty reasoning. It may have been studied extensively on biased populations, or the research may not have been funded adequately. Anyways, this is part of the "myopia is purely genetic" zeitgeist which is shoved down all of our throats in the west. Meanwhile, studies from Taiwan, Japan, and Korea show that myopia truly has an environmental component to it, e.g. childhood eyestrain and video games.
One may argue that could be because East Asian genetics are different from those of Europeans. I can't say exactly why, but I will say that the mainstream "myopia can't be cured/prevented" rhetoric has been extremely harmful for approximately 2 billion people on this planet.
You could say that for everything for which there was no treatment before and for which the problem is now considered solved with modern practice.
I have a pair of glasses to sell you which can fix that...
This was also what a eye doctor said to me ~20 years ago, although his prediction when it would happen didn't quite match.
Having said that, I started wearing glasses about a year ago when watching the TV between 10pm-12am (thanks to my wife who likes watching movies and I joined in). Turns out, my eyesight (near-sight) got a bit worse in a year and now I have a slightly thicker glasses. Again, this is all anecdotal and maybe age comes into play here with my eye sight (but the common knowledge--not sure how true that is--is that the nearsightedness gets better as people age, so what I'm experiencing is the opposite).
I really wouldn't recommend using an incorrect prescription. In the US anyways shops won't let you use a prescription older than 1 year.
Your eyesight might have stopped getting worse on its own. As is the case for most people (myopia doesn't run away to infinity after all!). Which is why corrective surgery is only indicated after your prescription has been stable for some time.
And to everyone saying "its just age"... well, it doesn't seem that way.
I noticed this pattern and stopped going to the Optometrist for five years. When I finally went again, my myopia was -0.25 worse, so I got new glasses. Then I went again the next year and its -0.25 worse again.
My myopia didn't worsen over a period of five years. Then suddenly worsened over a period of one year.
The idea is a lovely one. There is some anecdotal evidence that more time spent outside as a youth reduces the rate of myopia. I don't recall whether the funding was published in science letters or elsewhere but it was an unexpected result of a survey. I see no downside in trying this for my own children, as opposed to my experiment of underpowered glasses and eye exercises. The kids like being out there.
On the other hand, doing a single-arm chin up seems impossible and takes a decade. Enough funds have not been put into research.
I've always been suspicious of eye doctors since every visit they find an excuse to bump you up a notch or two.
Anecdotally, me and my brother had the same prescription in high school. I started refusing to go to the eye doctor. He kept going. I happened to see his contacts prescription maybe six years later. His prescription was now over a diopter stronger than mine. I needed new contacts, so went to an exam about that time. My prescription was still the same, "Well we'd like to bump you up a notch, but you can stay at this level if you want."
Further, I noticed growing up that the kids with the worst eyesight were the ones whose parents had the best insurance and could afford twice per year exams.
Anyway, I think glasses do irreparable harm to vision (particularly during adolescence). I think that will be borne out by research if anyone ever looks into it.
The myopia correction exercises do seem to help, but it's a fickle process. If it was easy it wouldn't be controversial. I would describe my experience as your baseline vision stays roughly the same, but you can learn to focus for short periods of time and improve your acuity by maybe 1 - 2 diopters.
Most people don't just decide that "hey, today is a good day for me to start wearing glasses, wouldn't it be cool!?"
For young kids, it's usually when they start doing badly in classes or people notice they are squinting. For adults, it's having trouble with things like the DMV exam, caught by routine checkups, or when they notice their peers can see much better than they can.
I could also give you endless anecdotes "proving" the opposite point, that wearing glasses can slow down or stop the progress, but why bother. That's all they are, they are not facts.
I was recommended this as a child - any improvement was temporary, and at best this will slow down the progression of myopia very slightly, in childhood.
Nothing beats sunlight and outdoor activity in childhood for reducing myopia, but if you already have it as an adult - you're stuck with it.
While the "new glasses" could of course be snake oil - assuming they're not for discussion would suggest that the muscles can be strengthened/corrected and all we're discussing is an implementation detail.
That's assuming these glasses actually work in this fashion, though. .. and that they work, of course.
I started at the beginning of quarantine, and it's actually been a wonderful time to try this since I rarely /need/ to look at anything farther away than my laptop screen. I started at a -2.25 diopter prescription in each eye. So for about $120 I got every pair of glasses down to 0.25 diopters, and a Snellen chart to track progress. Today, I'm down to a -1.25 prescription, although I plan on seeing an optometrist to confirm this once it's safe in the world to do so again.
The things I noticed during this experiment:
> It takes about a month minimum to drop down a prescription (I measure it as once I can reliably read to the 20/30 line on the Snellen chart).
> Given the above, I wear `current prescription + 0.5 diopters` whenever driving to make sure I'm well above the legal limits for driving (which is 20/40 vision)
> Going outside and just looking at stuff that's far away has the biggest positive effect on improving vision.
> Given 30 seconds of actively focusing, I can see temporary gains to my vision for the next 30 minutes or so
> My vision is waaay better in the morning
> I can now work on my laptop without needing glasses (still difficult to watch tv, though)
> Given the focus on what is and isn't blurry, I've started noticing the insane effect the brightness of a room has on how blurry things are
> I'm terrible at tracking data, given that I only have about 10 entries in my very basic excel sheet
> This has made me go on walks more often, which is just a net good all around. It feels "productive" to go for a walk rather than boring.
> It's very possible that this has only a limited return it can provide, since I've been plateaued at -1.25 for the last 3 months.
Focusing on nearby objects does not lead to myopia. Doing gymnastics with the eyes has no effect. Likewise, using under-sized glasses has no effect on myopia.
Here a supporting article about Inuit populations developed myopia just in one generation because of changes in lifestyle reducing outdoor activities:
Nearsightedness also runs in the family on my fathers side, but strangely none of my kids need glasses and they all grew up with much more TV and other screen time than I had.
I still needed glasses by 2nd grade and finally leveled out somewhere around the -8.50 range in my mid-late 30s. Hasn't really gotten too much worse as I got older, but as a lovely side note, I'm in my early 40s now and am getting the slightest bit of trouble on the other end of the spectrum where I can't always focus on small, close-up things if I have my glasses on. Guess it'll be time for bifocals soon.
https://www.nature.com/articles/20094
There's a review here:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135094621...
I have never heard that Myopia is purely genetic. Where is that claim even coming from?
They not not say that it's "purely genetic", but that's the impression one gets, that all those lifestyle params don't play any role...
Wikipedia says it's "a mix of genetic and environmnetal factors", and includes all of the above factors I've mentioned. But I've read many times in the past decades articles insisting that those other things don't matter (and presenting it as the medical consensus)...
Very much possible. I only have anecdotal evidence, but if you plotted the amount of time I spent at home starting at a TV versus other kids, you will probably find interesting correlations.
> , e.g. childhood eyestrain and video games.
Why single out video games in particular? If there is a problem, the problem is the screen. Or rather, how close it is. It is unlikely to be related to the content.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn about a feedback loop getting disrupted. For many organs in the body, an approximate shape will work just fine, who cares if an organ is slightly off by a few millimeters. Not so for the eyes.
Couldn't find a non-paywalled PDF, sorry, but here's the original study:
[1]https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Also, it might have changed since then (2012). If there's since been a study refuting this one, let me know, because it's nigh-impossible to find between the glut of citation-free news sites and blog posts, and paywalled journals.
Assuming such an effect really exists, I expect it would be very difficult to statistically distinguish from straight heredity. Kids' early childhood habits tend to reflect family culture.
It's well beyond a genetic predisposition, it was a genetic guarantee for me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546732
No lasting bad effects for me, at least. I'm still glad I tried it.
Most likely snake oil. Even more so since they are calling it "smart", I'm surprised there's no blockchain.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This thing can somehow physically reshape the eyes (or the cornea at least) permanently, with no surgery.
Your eye shape/length isn't set, it can both shorten and lengthen in response to stimulus.
I am by no means claiming this device works, just that changing the shape of the eye is at least theoretically possible without surgery.
" Maturity and Homeostasis of Refractive State Although emmetropization is generally thought of as occurring during early development, homeostatic growth mechanisms need to be at least as precise during maturity if size is to be tightly maintained. Does vision guide eye growth only during a narrow period in development? In tree shrews, there is clear evidence of a period of maximum sensitivity to form deprivation (Siegwart and Norton, 1998). In chicks, however, it appears that susceptibility declines steadily from the earliest period, perhaps being related to the growth rate, with older animals showing consistent but smaller responses to form deprivation (Wallman et al., 1987), even up to 1 year of age (Papastergiou et al., 1998). Adolescent marmosets and rhesus macaques also show decreased, but still significant, form-deprivation myopia Smith et al. 1999, Troilo et al. 2000b. In humans as well, there is evidence of changes in ocular dimensions in young adults associated with the progression of myopia, perhaps related to visual tasks (McBrien and Adams, 1997). Thus, the young adult eye is still subject to visually guided growth."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662730...
http://whywouldanyonebuythat.blogspot.com/2010/02/opti-grab-....
Clip from Steve Martin's "The Jerk" https://youtu.be/i5jTH89HjTA
One thing I forgot to mention is that when I started, I didn’t even have actual blurriness for the most part (unless it’s really far away). I had double vision along the vertical axis, and I did what Becker recommended to do which is to try to focus on the actual object (in my case mostly text), and ignore the ghosted copy so that two of them can converge. I would then intentionally defocus by looking in front or behind the text, and then try to refocus again. It keeps it slightly interesting/amusing.
There’s way more stuff out there on this topic today then there was when I first started practicing it, but it doesn’t seem to have changed all that much. People are still very skeptical about it and I guess optometrists still don’t talk about it.
I genuinely believe that optometrists are either evil, or horribly misguided with hubris.
It worked well enough that my myopia did not progress. However, I got bad astigmatism
Optometrists are really bad at measuring anything. Endmyopia probably works best for people who never had myopia, but the optometrists just measured some temporary accommodation as myopia. They always kept measuring my astigmatism as myopia for years. Only now that they have modern wavefront aberrometers, the device could tell them that they have measured the cylinder as 2 diopters too weak
It’s not perfect like it was when I was younger, I don’t know if it’ll ever be to that level of clarity but I did develop the ability to rapidly focus which for me is “good enough.” I don’t always have to force the focusing - relaxing the eye and not blinking also does the trick, but I combine both of them since I think of it as stretching the muscle out slightly, making it more elastic by ping ponging between focal planes a little bit. Either way, as long as I can impress the plebs by being able to read road signs at a distance that they can’t, I’ll be alright.
I wanted to make the original post because, HN being inquisitive into longevity and health research, I’m very surprised that over the years very few people discussed active focus or other “alternative” vision correction methods. I’m sure there must be lots of people who wear vision correction here. I’d rather not, so I decided to try the weird stuff first and see how things go.
Christmas trees look like psychedelic, technicolor schools of puffer fish, and I can clearly watch the intra-ocular "weather" as I move my head/eyes around.
Sounds like they think it will be permanent, since they use the world permanent in that exact snippet you quoted.
"Kubota Vision Demonstrates 3D Imaging Capabilities Using AI on PBOS"
The amount of detail sometimes varies, but then again, fog will do that especially when it is bright.
Edit: The person I asked said they wore their glasses some of the time but also spent some of the time without (when they were climbing in the rigging etc.)
Vendor forgot to takeoff the bass pro shop sticker.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/elink.fcgi?dbfrom...
dame paper, different links.
The fact that it's geometry is roughly static around a focal length that has sharp focus on the retina is a wonder of homeostasis with at least three known tuning loops:
1) the lens Moving on swiftly...
2) a slower feedback loop adjusting the choriod (hence focal length) in the order of hours.
3) an even slower loop adjusting the eye geometry over longer periods of time.
check out: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662730...
Other than vision, the second big change to me is I no longer trust science as much as I used to.
How is this any different from a youtuber claiming the earth is flat or vaccines cause autism?
Just street names, I guess? Those are a pain to navigate by anyway. You often already want to be in a lane by the time you can read the sign. The proper the way to relieve that mental burden is to have a navigator or GPS.
And that's why I said, "I think that will be borne out by research if anyone ever looks into it."
> You know what else does irreparable harm? Failing classes because you can't see!
And I am implying that I believe we are treating that problem sub-optimally and that I believe a better solution could be found for the majority of cases where myopia is an issue.
I read back through what I wrote and I believe I had a fairly measured tone with it. You disagree, that's fine. The whole point of "science" is that people are allowed to have contrary hypotheses and the data should be the final arbiter or who is correct.
I mostly only wear reading glasses at work.
Correlation does not imply having something to do with another.
For example, in the first decade of the 21st century, spending on space exploration had a 99.8% correlation with a specific subset of suicides (hanging?).
By its very definition, "correlation" means exactly "a mutual relation": https://www.dictionary.com/browse/correlation The example you're giving is called coincidence not correlation. There are times where words' etymologies loose their connection with their current meaning, but that is not the case here, where we have "con" meaning "together" + "relation", which is a logical construction agreeing with word's meaning.
> Statistics. the degree to which two or more attributes or measurements on the same group of elements show a tendency to vary together.
If it actually worked long-term, it would be a published paper on PubMed and ophthalmologists would be readily prescribing it to their patients.
I'm not ruling out a temporary improvement in myopia from exercises. Sort of like squinting or putting eye drops in your eyes can temporarily make you less nearsighted.
But if there are positive, long-term effects from simple, harmless exercise (spoiler alert - you can't change the shape of your eye permanently with exercise like you can with a muscle), it would be part of eye doctor's treatment plans everywhere.
But it isn't, so it doesn't pass the smell test.
You will just figure out what your eyes really need faster by wearing eyeglasses.
But this study shows that at least the kind of glasses one wears can change the progression of myopia, so arguments from theory are unconvincing to me: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22161388/
I have no idea what the actual truth is here. It seems like a variety of opinions abound, although everybody seems to agree the phenomenon of feeling like things are worse when you've recently worn glasses is real. So in this case I'll continue go with what works for me: generally not wearing glasses except when driving, which is the only place it makes a practical difference for me.
The other thing that really bugged me was the fact that these lenses could not correct my vision across my entire dilated pupil, and that issue also got worse as the day went on. That resulted in terrible halos around light sources in high contrast situations, such as at night when driving home from work.
------
1. Glasses that blur what's on peripheral vision https://abc11.com/amp/4176773/
> too much time spent in front of a screen confuses the eye, since everything is in focus. The eye keeps growing, leading to myopia.
2. Glasses to stop myopia are successful in multi-site trial https://newsroom.uw.edu/news/glasses-stop-myopia-are-success...
Glasses with fogged edges prevent over focus:
> What’s supposed to happen as your eye grows, is that things should begin to go out of focus in the periphery of your vision. That’s a signal for the eyes to stop growing.
3. Multifocal contact lenses slow myopia progression in children https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/multifo...
> Animal studies have shown that focusing light in front of the retina cues the eye to slow growth.
4. Putting contact lenses on monkeys _causes_ myopia and removing them slows myopia growth https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-48009-3
5. "How Atropine Eye Drops Can Slow Myopia Progression" https://www.myopiainstitute.com/eye-care/how-atropine-eye-dr...
> Applying atropine eye drops dilates the pupils and temporarily paralyzes the focusing muscle inside the eye. It also relaxes the eyes’ focusing mechanisms.
Your eye grows without your brain's involvement. Sharp focus on the back of the eye, especially in the periphery, tells the eye to grow longer because it's overfocusing. This leads to the worsening of myopia. Things that cause sharp focus on the retina and fovea: contacts, glasses, and holding things close to your face that keep everything in focus. This may be why being outside is correlated with slowing myopia progression, because you wont have things constantly in focus in your peripheral vision from it being close to you.
I have a serious question: did you not come across any of this research? No one seems to have familiarity with these concepts in this HN thread. Did you see articles like these and skip over them? Or, maybe, were you only googling for myopia and sunlight, which is unlikely to return results like these?
As an adult, it would certainly be an outstanding discovery if this did matter. Which is why I'm skeptical about these supposed glasses. Sounds like snake oil, quacks like snake oil.
For children, teenagers and young adults: maybe. It's all about the eye shape, and children's bodies are still in development.
Why not? It's not about being "still in development".
All of our organs (heart, liver, knees, joints, ears) can deteriorate in various ways if we don't take care of them or abuse them in certain ways as adults (e.g. ears and loud music, especially on headphones, can lead to reduced hearing). Heart, well, we can have the heart of a 80 year old at 40 if we have the wrong lifestyle.
So why not eyes as well?
(Not to mention myopia usually rises over time in adults that have it - and they change glass perscriptions etc.), so it's clearly something that develops in adulthood too. Not to mention other things related to the eyes and their plasticity etc., like presbyopia, that strike at ~ 40-45 or so.
The point was: once you start wearing glasses it accelerates the slide. + or - doesn't really matter all that much.
So there may very well be more than one effect at work here. I can't really see the instrument cluster in the car but I know it by heart so it's not a problem and speed I can do by ear and get it well within the margin of error for speeding tickets.
I should probably get re-tested and maybe try bi-focals, but with the amount of driving I do right now I don't need to bother, the car is used so little I have it on a trickle charger to prevent the battery from going dead.
This requires having a doctor you trust.
My experience with most doctors is that I can trust them about as far as a used car salesman.
Costco is set up this way: their optometrists are contractors who get a flat fee per eye exam, and they don't know or care about what else you buy while you're there.
They might have a revenue sharing agreement, maybe, but they don't even encourage you to use it.
And beyond that, following the logic from the recent surgery thread: they see their patients see better. They see all the good cases, where someone walks out more confident and with better sight. Their product helps people. But then so do homeopathic placebos (to a certain (measurable) extent), and that's the hard part to figure out.
Of course, in this case everyone truly does see better when they walk out and what GP is wondering about are the long-term effects. This stuff is complicated, though I frankly have a hard time believing this claim of "just stop wearing glasses and you'll see better". Surely someone would have noticed that? But without doing a deep dive into the research here, it's all just speculation on both their part and mine.
And for what it's worth, you may have had a string of bad doctors. I never had that feeling with any of mine (though I've only ever seen doctors in the Netherlands and Germany).
Anecdotally, I have a low-grade myopia which gets observably worse after a lot of near work or sitting the whole day in front of a computer. I can pretty consistently reverse through the use of print pushing and use of anti-corrective lenses (basically forcing myself to look at a slightly out-of-focus image each day). It also consistently worsens when I stop doing it, especially when I stop spending time outside.
These kinds of articles will then list relevant results, citing other relevant papers so you can continue going deeper from there.
In addition, wasn't there a study that found Australia children of Asian descent don't follow the same trend of myopia? IIRC, the researchers found that Australian children tend to spend a lot more time outside and get more natural sunlight. I wish I could find the original article.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/history-outdoor-schoo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_air_school
Maybe just have a ton of natural light in your buildings, energy conservation be dammed?
It's harder now because of screens general inability to work well in daylight, although that might be a plus in most schools.
So the perception that you see more clearly in bright outdoor conditions could be true.
I guess if I had to choose, I would pick needing glasses for far away rather than up close. But I wouldn't trade normal vision for myopia just to avoid needing reading glasses in old age.
My myopia is pretty bad (-9.25 and -8.5 in contacts), so I don't even get the benefit of reading without correction.
I'm -7.00 / -7.25 and this happens to me if I wear contacts instead of glasses. With glasses I can comfortably read a book or screen from about 10 inches away and beyond. With contacts I have to hold it at arms' length before I can make out small text. This is one of the many reasons I've stuck with glasses over the years. Another advantage of glasses is that I can take them off and have a natural and detailed "magnifying" effect. This comes in handy when soldering small components (wearing non-correcting safety glasses) or examining a circuit board for tiny defects like cold solder joints or broken components.
https://www.reviewofoptometry.com/news/article/eye-drop-for-...
I've been following the development of this drug since before it was bought by Novartis.
I was expecting the average results to get better along with the median, but perhaps the dosage just wasn't high enough in this trial.
And then there's my eyes. I have severe double vision (as a result of surgery last year) and my brain is just like "meh, suck it up"; and I'm left walking into things on regular basis because there's two of everything. How come _his_ brain figured out upside down, and mine can't figure out 2 of everything? (I'm not actually asking, just complaining a bit /sigh)
>The development of chicks towards emmetropization was observed at various levels of illumination: (10.000 Lux, 500 Lux and 50 Lux). Result: After 90 days 50 Lux resulted in a mean myopia of –2.41 D, 500 Lux resulted in +0.03 D, and 10.000 Lux resulted in hyperopia of +1.1 D.
>"Categorized according to their objectively measured average daily light exposure and adjusting for potential confounders (age, sex, baseline axial length, parental myopia, nearwork, and physical activity), children experiencing low average daily light exposure (mean daily light exposure: 459 ± 117 lux, annual eye growth: 0.13 mm/y) exhibited significantly greater eye growth than children experiencing moderate (842 ± 109 lux, 0.060 mm/y), and high (1455 ± 317 lux, 0.065 mm/y) average daily light exposure levels."
>for myopic children 6 to 12 years old a mean progression of – 0.35 D in winter and –0.14 D in summer. This was attributed to the children's extended time spent outdoors in summer
Getting more sunlight is the most helpful thing one can do without special equipment
>I have a serious question: did you not come across any of this research?
I hadn't seen the more recent developments on these preventative glasses, no. However I don't tend to give too much credence to individual studies especially when reported through mainstream media. You see such studies and articles supporting all kinds of contradictory conclusions all the time.
Wikipedia isn't a reliable source, but it is kind of useful as a quick overview of current ideas on a topic. Skimming the article,
>The near work hypothesis, also referred to as the "use-abuse theory" states that spending time involved in near work strains the intraocular and extraocular muscles. Some studies support the hypothesis, while other studies do not.[3] While an association is present, it is not clearly causal.[3]
and
>There is preliminary evidence that the protective effect of outdoor activities on the development of myopia is due, at least in part, to the effect of long hours of exposure to daylight on the production and the release of retinal dopamine.[15][29][30][31]
So, immediately it seems like we aren't so certain as you suggest we are what the cause of myopia is. And your assertion that "..exposure to light brightness has nothing to do with myopia" is directly contradicted here. And from a cited recent (2019) review paper [1]
> Huang et al. highlighted, in a recent systematic review and meta-analysis, that near-work activities were related with higher odds of myopia (odds ratio 1.14; 95% CI 1.08–1.20) and that the odds of myopia increased by 2% (OR: 1.02; 95% CI 1.01–1.03) for every one diopter-hour more of weekly near work [110].
> In contrast, there are studies reporting that near work is not associated with faster rates of myopia progression [85, 111–113].
> Therefore the relationship between near work and myopia is complex and needs to be investigated.
> On the other hand, several recent epidemiological studies suggest that greater time spent outdoors might have a protective effect against myopia development and progression [114–116].
So, though I am far from being an expert after reading these few articles, they all seem to strongly contradict your assertion that "It's not unknown", and also that the research all agrees with your points.
Goodness Wikipedia, this isn't the theory at all. It has nothing to do with muscle strain. We know for a fact that in youth, the eyeball grows longer when it's overfocusing (especially in fovea), and stops growing when things are blurry. That's how it maintain focus as you grow and age. This isn't a theory, it's how the eye works. There are already multiple types of technology that successfully slow and stop myopia based on this principle, as listed in my post.
The mechanism of outdoor light is just a hypothesis without known direct link. It may be related but there's no direct evidence for it yet.
One very interesting thing that convinced me to start doing this: if you get measurements taken at night (vs early in the day), your prescriptions will be stronger as your eyes are already tired. So your new glasses may be too strong for you but your eyes will adapt to it and become worse.
I'd recommend getting glasses online from Zenni [0]. They just ask for the measurements of the prescription. There's nothing about expiration dates. And they're super inexpensive! Glasses are a racket.
I can't speak for the quality/durability of their frames, as I only used them to get some prescription lenses for my Valve Index so I can play in VR without wearing my glasses.
https://www.optometricsofchatsworth.com/blog/study-finds-saf...
>The study analyzed 200 pairs of glasses that had been ordered from 10 different websites. The lenses were analyzed based on a number of criteria, including measurement of sphere power, cylinder power and axis, add power (if specified), separation of distance of optical centers and center thickness. The AOA reports that in some cases, single vision lenses were delivered instead of the bifocals that had been ordered. In other cases, specific lens treatments were either added to an or were left off.
>>almost half of the eyeglasses tested in the study (the AOA reports the number at 44.8 percent) didn't have the correct prescription strength or presented problems with safety.
It really is annoying due to the difficulty finding a good optometrist who does more than the basics. The entire process is still a matter of closest estimate when you consider that our eyes don't work in exact "steps" along a range. On top of that, the center point of the lens varies a lot based on exactly how a set of frames sits on your particular face. I've had plenty of glasses that were headache city because the IPD was right, but the lens center didn't line up properly with my pupil (vertically, when worn).
Then don't even get me started on the whole Luxottica thing where it can be another pain in the ass to find nice looking frames at many optometrist-attached stores. There are a few others with both optometrists and glasses sales (Warby Parker, if you have one of the brick and mortars nearby, for example).
For someone like me, even the "cheap" stores usually involve an extra $150-200 per set of glasses due to my cruddy eyesight and the need for the highest index lens material. I usually end up bouncing back and forth between somewhere like Warby when I really am due for another exam and will stomach the $200 cost for $20 worth of plastic. If I break or lose my specs too soon after, I tend to just suck it up and roll the dice with one of the cheapie online vendors.
However, in both of those studies, participants wore their under-corrective glasses continually, regardless of whether they were doing near-work or just walking / looking at a distance. This is a crucial error, as pointed out by at least Hung and Ciuffreda: <https://www.oepf.org/sites/default/files/journals/jbo-volume...>. It makes intuitive sense to me that under-corrective or anti-corrective glasses should only be worn for a limited amount of time each time and only when doing near-work, in order to induce temporary pressure that the (feedback systems of the) eye can then attempt to correct.
Also see this 2009 review by Barrett regarding the more general practice of behavioral vision therapy: <https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-1313.2008.00607.x>. Behavioural vision therapy is a wider term, referring not only to the effort to slow myopia, but also to correct other vision problems through changes in behaviour.
> In the early 2000s, when researchers started to look at specific behaviours, such as books read per week or hours spent reading or using a computer, none seemed to be a major contributor to myopia risk
> Rose's team tried to eliminate any other explanations for this link — for example, that children outdoors were engaged in more physical activity and that this was having the beneficial effect. But time engaged in indoor sports had no such protective association; and time outdoors did, whether children had played sports, attended picnics or simply read on the beach ... what seemed to matter most was the eye's exposure to bright light.
if your child loves watching tv, bring the ipad to the park and make her watch it outside.
I was in agreement until this.
Doesn't this defeat the purpose of being outside? To actually use their eyes to see things near and far, run about and get those muscles working? I don't know what it is about modern parenting that seems wholeheartedly dedicated to the task of making children worship at the altar of Disney and Youtube while denying any chance of developing mental and physical toughness.