Outdoor exercise helps reduce the risk of myopia

Myopia is becoming a disease, with dangerous complications when myopia is severe. Increasing outdoor exercise time helps reduce the onset of myopia.

Control the risk of myopia

Children who attend school for more years tend to be more myopic, and at a given school level, higher-achieving children tend to be more myopic, as do children in more streams or classes.

Increase time outdoors to slow the onset of myopia

PHOTO: TUAN MINH

Increasing time outdoors to delay the onset of myopia has been shown in clinical trials and in global trials. Although the amount of time spent outdoors is controversial, at least 2 hours outdoors per day, including at least 1 hour of physical activity, is a common and strongly recommended level.

Children who spend more time outdoors are protected from the onset of myopia. The identified mechanism (increased retinal dopamine release due to brighter outdoor light, with dopamine slowing the rate of axial elongation of the eyeball) has been recognized in several studies.

Myopia increases with age

Myopia, which used to be just a matter of replacing and buying new glasses or contact lenses, has now become a myopia disease with potential and dangerous complications such as retinal detachment, macular degeneration, pathological cataracts and pigmentary glaucoma. If the myopia is severe, the glasses will need to be high.

Myopia is not random but reflects a genetic tendency, and in particular, the main cause is excessive eye work in low light or inappropriate light conditions.

Several studies have shown that the prevalence of myopia begins to increase from around age 6, when children start school. The rate of increase is slow in the early primary years but increases rapidly towards the end of primary school. The increase in prevalence then gradually slows down in later school years. The prevalence of myopia and nearsightedness increases with age. For high myopia, the prevalence of myopia remains near or below 1% until age 11-12, but it continues to increase at least until the end of schooling.

The levels of myopia: - 3D, - 6D, -10D and -15 D are also the corresponding warning levels: normal myopia, pathological myopia, malignant myopia for patients, parents, and doctors to pay due attention. Accordingly, medical costs and the risk of blindness also increase accordingly.

The rate of myopia could reach 50% by 2030, instead of 2050 as ophthalmologists had predicted.

Regarding the treatment of myopia, along with the use of prescription glasses, appropriate light is very important to prevent and control the severity of myopia. In which red light is increasingly mentioned by many people. Red light (wavelength 630 nm), if the light source is LED, will not produce UV or infrared rays (not harmful to the lens and retina).

Red light is being used in the control of myopia, especially in children, by stimulating healthy eye tissue, slowing the elongation of the eyeball - the main cause of myopia. The mechanism is believed to be through mitochondria, increasing ATP energy for eye cells, helping them function more efficiently.

Red light is a non-invasive, safe method, and can be combined with other measures such as Ortho-K lenses (rigid gas permeable contact lenses worn at night while sleeping to temporarily reshape the cornea, helping to correct refractive errors such as nearsightedness, astigmatism and control myopia progression in children) or eyeglasses to increase the effectiveness of myopia control.

Source: https://thanhnien.vn/van-dong-ngoai-troi-giup-giam-nguy-co-can-thi-185250923101143183.htm