Although the study involved more than 1,000 students in grades one and the results were quite significant and showed that there is indeed an association between outdoor activities and myopia, researchers can’t help but feel concerned that shortsightedness is still so common among young children.
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Myopia is “a vision condition in which close objects are seen clearly, but objects farther away appear blurred”.
The authors wrote, “Our study achieved an absolute difference of 9.1% in the incidence rate of myopia, representing a 23% relative reduction in incident myopia after 3 years”.
New research suggests children who play outside every day are less likely to develop nearsightedness, Live Science reported.
There is now no proven effective method for preventing the onset of myopia, but this new research suggests increasing outdoor activities could make a small difference.
The study looked at 853 children from 12 year groups across six primary schools. What’s more, the parents of kids going to these schools were also told to engage their little ones in outdoor activities, especially during holidays and weekends.
The treatment group (952 children) had an extra 40 minutes of outdoor activities added to each school day, and the children in the control group (951 children) carried on with their usual routine. They had discovered that being active while spending time outdoors didn’t have that much of an impact on the children’s chances of developing nearsightedness. Cumulative change in spherical equivalent refraction (myopic shift) after 3 years was significantly less in the intervention group than in the control group.
Michael X. Repka, M.D., M.B.A., of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, comments on the findings of this study in an accompanying editorial. The other six kept their regular schedule, which had less time outside. The researchers also discovered that among the kids who became nearsighted during the study, the degree to which their eyesight worsened was slightly smaller than those who spent more time outdoors.
“Both schools and parents should encourage students to spend more time outdoors so long as the UV protection measures are undertaken”, said lead author Dr. Mingguang He of Guangzhou’s Sun Yat-sen University, in a report by UPI. Therefore, the researchers explained, a delay in this process among young children can be beneficial for long-term in their eye health. The kids that did develop myopia after three years may have also benefited from the experiment because if it weren’t for the time spent outside they might have developed a more severe type of myopia.
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The results could not be explained by myopia in the parents (a risk factor for myopia in their children) as the researchers took this into account in their analysis.
