"We were meant to be outdoor creatures": Experts say screens are only part of poor vision epidemic

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“We were meant to be outdoor creatures”: Experts say screens are only part of poor vision epidemic
Outdoor time is essential to the developing eye. We're getting less and less of it

By Elizabeth Hlavinka
Staff Writer
Published March 27, 2025 5:30AM (EDT)


(Salon) It has long been thought that digging your nose in a book and spending too much time reading things up close could cause near-sightedness. When books were replaced with smartphones, it was easy to blame the screens instead. But as near-sightedness rates continued to rise across the world, researchers began to understand that it wasn’t just technology that was changing the way we see the world.

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Although genetics play an important role in determining whether someone will develop myopia, the increasing prevalence is happening too quickly for genetics to be the sole cause — meaning the rise of near-sightedness must also be caused by something in the environment, said Dr. Katherine Weise, a pediatric optometrist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

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In the U.S., 25% of the population was near-sighted in the 1970s, and that rose to 41% in the early 2000s, according to data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Although there is not more recent comprehensive federal data in the U.S. to compare trends, studies from around the world indicate that those rates have continued to rise, with China reporting a steady increase in myopia over the past decade. In Taiwan, up to 90% of young people have myopia.

Because electronic devices were not widespread when myopia started to increase, it is thought that the myopia epidemic could be caused by children spending less time outside, where a wide range of wavelengths of light can interact with their eyes and promote healthy growth, said Dr. Safal Khanal, an optometrist and researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. ....................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/03/27/we-were-meant-to-be-outdoor-creatures-experts-say-screens-are-only-part-of-poor-vision-epidemic/