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?
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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=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/
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
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.
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.
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.