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Eyesight Worsening as Billions Spend More Time Playing Games and Watching TV.

Due to coronavirus lockdowns, less time outdoors and more time on screens is leading to significantly more people suffering from myopia, especially children. With the lockdown, homeschooling, and working from home, we are all staring at screens, tablets, and mobile phones even more than we already did before the COVID-19 pandemic. Most people spend endless amounts of time at home now and rarely go outside. But that means our eyes are constantly focused on objects in close range inside, and were lacking the benefits of looking into the distance.

A lack of exercise is particularly noticeable in children including exercise for their eyes. Recent studies from the Netherlands and China show that as a result of COVID-19 restrictions, myopia has increased dramatically, especially in children. The phenomenon has been calledquarantine myopia.

Data from more than 120,000 Chinese school childrenshowed that kids between the ages of six and eight were up to three times more likely to have myopia in 2020 than children of their age in previous years. In this age group, visual acuity shifted by a substantial 0.3 diopters towards myopia.

This combination more screen time and less outdoor time may actually harm childrens vision and put them at higher risk of developing myopia, or nearsightedness. That can lead to serious eye problems in the future, including some potentially blinding diseases. A review of25 years of researchfound that working up close like reading or using a tablet increased the odds of myopia.

For example, a nationwide study in Taiwan found that after-school study programs with lots of closeup work were associated with an increased likelihood of nearsightedness among children ages 7 to 12. A study of Chinese schoolchildren found that increased time spent working with the eyes focused on something less than 20 centimetres away was associated with myopia.

Researchers in Ireland found thatgreater than three hours of screen time per dayincreased the odds of myopia in schoolchildren, and investigators in Denmark found that the risk of myopia approximately doubled inDanish teenagers who used screen devicesfor more than six hours per day.

Getting outdoors matters

Some studies now suggest thatspending time outdoorsmay be able to slow the onset and progression of nearsightedness.

In Taiwan, first-grade students at schools with programs designed to increase their outdoors timeto 11 hours or more each week had less progression of myopia over one year compared to their peers. Similarly, in China, researchers found thatadding 40 minutes of outdoor activitya day at school reduced the development of nearsightedness in six-year-old children over the next three years.

Thank you for taking the time to read this news article Eyesight Worsening as Billions Spend More Time Playing Games and Watching TV. For more UK daily news, Spanish daily news and Global news stories, visit the Euro Weekly News home page.

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Eyesight Worsening as Billions Spend More Time Playing Games and Watching TV - Euro Weekly News

This entry was posted on January 25, 2021 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Eye Sight & Vision. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |