Myopia is also called short sightedness or near-sightedness, and usually causes people to have problems seeing distance objects clearly. Typically spectacles are prescribed for looking at the board in school, driving (especially at night), TV, movies, and other distance tasks such as watching sport. Many people with mild myopia wear their spectacles only when required, but other people prefer to wear their correction most of the time. Contact lenses are a common alternative for people with myopia, and can be worn most of the time or only for social occasions or sport.

Short sightedness sometimes begins developing in early teens, and may continue to change gradually through the teen years. For some people the myopia occurs in late teens or early twenties, and is often associated with prolonged patterns of intense near visual effort, such as working on a computer.

Our current understanding of how and why myopia occurs for some people and not others is incomplete, despite very intensive research around the world. However, it is now understood that if one parent is myopic, there is a thirty percent chance that the child will become myopic. If two parents are myopic the risk for their child of becoming short sighted is sixty percent.

Whether short sightedness develops in a child of myopic parents, how quickly it changes and to what degree it progresses, also seems to depend on the amount of reading and other near visual tasks in which a person engages. There are still arguments in research circles as to whether parents with myopia pass on the gene for myopia to their children, or whether some of the influence is the fact that parents who like to read also pass on their love of reading to their children!

For many people the increasing degree of myopia over time is a concern, especially the fear that your eyes will keep on getting worse and worse, and the lenses will become thicker and thicker. However, usually myopia stops changing in people’s mid-twenties.

Options for treatment of myopia include spectacles, contact lenses and laser surgery. For some people, and especially some children, the spectacles may be prescribed in graduated focus form so that when they are reading they are not using a distance prescription. In such cases the distance prescription may be too strong for near visual tasks, resulting in excessive focusing effort and eyestrain, or the possibility of causing the eyes to become even more short sighted. Other options include ensuring your reading and computer tasks are organised as ideally as possible to minimise focusing effort and fatigue, so that this does not contribute to development of more myopia. This involves good posture and lighting, and regular breaks from the effort of reading (please ask for more details, and we will be happy to explain further). Sometimes vision exercises may be helpful in reducing the progression of myopia.

Each person’s myopia is different, and it is important to understand the individual differences in your type of short sightedness, how likely it is to change, and the choices in correction, including the benefits of using high-index spectacle lenses, possibly with anti-reflection coating to provide better looking spectacles with thinner lenses. Please feel free to ask us about your degree of myopia, the possibility of change in the future, and the choices in management available to you.