Kairi posts a great study link in the forum today (published in OVPJournal, site here), looking at psychological stress in children from myopia development.

As you already know, myopia isn’t a real illness.  Giving glasses to children for myopia is a terrible idea.  I’ve been saying this for years, while working to help parents use a more holistic approach to manage their child’s healthy eyesight.  

As usual, there is science substantiating these common sense premises:

Psychological Stress in Childhood and Myopia Development
Louise Katz, PhD, Columbia State Community College, Columbia, Tennessee Kristo er S. Berlin, PhD, e University of Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee

ABSTRACT

Background: Myopia is a common human vision problem and is increasing in prevalence, yet its etiology remains unclear. A role of psychological stress in the etiology of various ocular disturbances has been suggested, but virtually no research has explored a possible link between psychological stress and myopia development.

Methods: In this extension of a recent study, participants (n = 457) who were predominantly undergraduate students completed an anonymous survey assessing both their adult evaluation and retrospective childhood evaluation of their childhood stress.

Results: Myopic participants had a significantly higher score on the Stress-Fear-Abuse scale in a factor analysis than did emmetropic participants. Exploratory analyses suggested that myopes in their childhood had lower self-esteem, were more lonely, experienced more criticism about physical aspects of themselves, had higher weight, sat closer to the television, and may have experienced more fear and more very stressful events or situations.

Conclusions: Our data suggest that, based on adult evaluations, myopic children have more childhood stress, and based on retrospective childhood evaluations, there is no di erence in experience of certain speci c childhood stressors. Our data suggest, therefore, that myopic children may have perceptual problems related to recognition and interpretation of stressful situations in their lives. Our ndings point to possible unexplored risk factors for myopia and suggest complex interrelationships between psychological stress, childhood emotions, and myopia development in children.

Keywords: children, emotions, myopia, psychological stress, vision

Here’s the entire study, in PDF form.

Don’t put your kids through this.  Don’t let your friends put their kids through this (or at least give them enough ammunition to make educated decisions).  

Housekeeping:  Huge update to session manager is complete.  It’s now faster, nicer looking, and much easier for me to add/update sessions for you.  Long time coming this one, thanks for hanging in there and putting up with the various glitches.  

The logging tool part II is about to go into production.  You’ll be able to show starting and current diopter, as well as centimeter progress in your forum signature (opt-in, of course).  Along with that, a page of progress report overviews, so you can see how everybody else is doing (here too of course, opt-in).   This should be a really nice addition to the forum posts and reports, putting tangible data with every story, question, and update (if the participant choses to share). 

Cheers,

-Jake