In focus: Myopia emerges as ‘classic industrial disease’

Myopia is making the headlines and contributing to growing concern about the potential damage of urbanisation to health and wellbeing.

An article on the ‘myopia boom’ in China published in Nature last year focused as much on children being glued to smartphone screens and rejecting outdoor play as it did on the genetic factors involved.

Closer to home, short sightedness was found to be twice as common as it was in the 1960s in last year’s landmark Northern Ireland Childhood Errors of Refraction (NICER) study, conducted by researchers at Ulster University. It was estimated one in five teenagers in the UK are now myopic.