More and more children are getting myopic today: Dr Alejandra Armesto

In an interview with ETHealthworld during WSPOS 2017 organized by L V Prasad Eye Institute, Dr Alejandra Armesto, Staff of Opthalmology Dept, German Hospital, Argentina talks about the rapid surge in myopia among children. Edited excerpts:

Myopia: Why are children getting so early?
The population in well developed parts of Asia, urban China, Singapore and Japan are getting more myopic due to environmental factors, and not only through genetic factors because they increase the rate of myopia in less years. It seems they are spending less time in outdoor activities and more time in reading or doing near vision work.

This seems to stimulate the elongation of the eyeball because it is related to the levels of dopamine that seems to stimulate the sclera to grow and to have a larger eye ball than expected. There are many initiatives that are related to the treatment of this problem because in this country it tends to be a very important public health problem not only because people will need more optic devices but because they are getting highly myopic. High myopia is also getting associated to other kinds of disease like myopic maculopathy etc.

What can we do about myopia?
We have to stimulate the children to be outdoors. There are some papers that studied these aspects where there were statistical differences in children who were outdoors and who were not. There were less myopia incidence rate among the children who were outdoors for 40 minutes and more. The recommendation is that children dedicate much more time outdoors.

Newer treatments available
Many groups tried to develop an eye drop to treat myopia and arrest the growth of the eyeball, because larger eye ball is more myopic eyeball. Many years ago they started with atropine, many good papers were done in Singapore about this subject and the problem with Atropine was that it had many side effects. They tried with another drug called Pirenzepine which was not that effective and they returned to atropine. Nowadays we are prescribing Atropine 0.01 percent once a day for 6-7 days a week to children aged from six to 17 years old in order the arrest the growth of the eye ball as much as possible.