Screen overuse triggering wave of short-sightedness

The amount of time we spend look­ing at screens has gone up in re­cent times. At the same time, short-sight­ed­ness has risen. The pres­i­dent of the Of­fi­cial Col­lege of Op­ti­cians and Op­tometrists of Cat­alo­nia (Coooc), Al­fons Bielsa, con­firms that the sec­tor is di­ag­nos­ing my­opia in more and more chil­dren and young peo­ple. He also points out that hu­mans “evolved to be in open spaces, thus the body’s way of adapt­ing to screens is to gen­er­ate my­opia in order to ac­cus­tom the eye to work at close dis­tances.”

Bielsa says that any­one can live with a cou­ple of diop­tres, as a small amount does not pose a major health risk, but he clar­i­fies: “Once five diop­tres are ex­ceeded, there is a risk of de­vel­op­ing other types of patholo­gies. From seven diop­tres on­wards, the risk of reti­nal de­tach­ment mul­ti­plies by forty-four and it be­comes a pub­lic health prob­lem.”

The Coooc head points out that nat­ural light “is the best in­hibitor of my­opia” and for this rea­son he pre­scribes “spend­ing time out­doors, with­out any screens”. He also ad­vises not get­ting too close to de­vices, not to look at screens in the dark, and not to give mo­bile phones or tablets to tod­dlers “be­cause if they focus at a very close dis­tance a lot, they will end up short-sighted.”

Bielsa ad­vises every­one to prac­tise 20-20-20 when using screens: “Every 20 min­utes, look away to a dis­tance of 20 feet [about six me­tres] for 20 sec­onds.” He also con­firms that there have been more cases of short-sight­ed­ness di­ag­nosed dur­ing the pan­demic, but most im­por­tantly, the num­ber of diop­tres have been on the rise.

A 2019 Coooc study found that one in three chil­dren under the age of eight used a cell phone or tablet on a daily basis, and that 19% used screens be­tween one and two hours a day. Eight out of ten par­ents ad­mit­ted to being aware that screens are bad for their chil­dren’s vi­sion and yet al­lowed them to use them twice as long as rec­om­mended.

In fact, the rise of short-sight­ed­ness due to the gen­eral use of screens has be­come a global prob­lem. The World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion es­ti­mates that by 2050, half of the world’s pop­u­la­tion will have my­opia.