When you go to an eye doctor in any hospital in the world, you will be examined, tested, and prescribed your choice of glasses, contact lenses, or corrective surgery. If you ask, "Doc, why am I like this? You will be told some nonsense, as for example they told me that the mucous membrane of my eye dries up from the air conditioner....
If anyone has not yet realized, no ophthalmologist does not delve into the causes of your myopia, his business is to sell you "crutches". Commonly known causes of myopia are such, they are usually told to future doctors in med school: 1) it is either a violation of the shape of the eye (the eye is elongated); 2) violation of focusing components of the eye (accommodation, a problem in the cornea and / or lens ). However, personally, these data were not enough for me, so I decided to get to the deeper truths to understand how to deal with it. So: In a healthy person, light that enters the eye and focuses exactly on the retina. It's like catching focus with a microscope or a camera - there is only one position where the image is clear. To create this focus, there is a cornea and a lens inside the eye - a kind of organic lens of the eye. There are also muscles that stretch this lens. When we focus on close objects, these muscles contract, stretching the lens, when we look far away the muscles are at rest. With age, the lens becomes stiffer, so the muscles can not stretch it and a person has the opposite condition to myopia - farsightedness (we can see far, but we need glasses to see close). Here we can make the first conclusion - the human eye is not designed for constant focusing near. The eye expends more energy to do so. Books, smartphones, computers strain your eyes literally! Further, the cornea for the eye is sort of like the protective glass on your smartphone, it has a spherical shape. Violation of this shape of the cornea leads to a pathology called astigmatism, in which we see a distorted image of objects. Here it is also a matter of focus, but with astigmatism there is NO focal point, but a focal spot. To put it crudely. With myopia, the cornea is OK. Next, there is the sclera around the eye. It's a sheath around the eye, like a tight covering for the eye. It provides protection and nourishment to the eye and keeps it spherical. As we age, the sclera becomes less strong, it stretches and tears, analogous to wrinkles on the face. Once it stops performing its function, the eye elongates and becomes egg-shaped
The second conclusion is that disruption of trophics and synthesis of connective tissue (collagen, elastin) leads to disruption of the structure of the sclera of the eye. I.e. diets, hormonal background, diseases all affect your eyes! Further, there is a definite vasculature in the eye. Vascular problems lead to impaired blood supply to the eye. Hypothetically, anemia can also lead to eye problems, because it causes hypoxia in many tissues of the body. The third conclusion is to follow the development of pathologies that create problems for vessels and tissues that they feed, it is primarily atherosclerosis, anemia. And it would seem impossible to reverse myopia. That's what you've heard from doctors. But that's not entirely true. New research on the subject gives us hope. The elongation of the eyeball can be stopped:
For example, some researchers see a link between homocysteine and myopia. It is a metabolite of methionine, which destroys blood vessels and is the cause of cardiovascular disease. The more of this metabolite, the higher the permeability of the blood vessels (in our case, the blood vessels of the eye). It is necessary to lower homocysteine (vitamins, B1, B6 and B12, avoiding coffee, etc.).
Further, activation of GABA receptors (A, B, C) in the eye leads to increased myopia. However, activation of dopamine receptors levels out myopia. From this we can draw the primitive conclusion that unhappy people see worse. Drops with dopamine receptor agonists can reduce myopia, animal studies have already been done.
Activation of PPAR receptors in the eye reduces myopia (Proven on me, I take a PPARγ agonist for this purpose). I.e. agonists of these receptors (these are drugs to treat dyslipidemia and high blood pressure) can also help. By the way, another truth comes to mind here - the eyes need healthy lipid metabolism, i.e. milk (or fish oil) in the diet and healthy metabolism that "processes" these lipids.
Walking in open spaces also reduces myopia, but only during the day! At night, physiological myopia occurs so that you can see well up close. For me personally, I realized that driving in this case works even better, because behind the wheel you are always looking into the distance. Here it is important to note a banal truth - you need to look less at smartphones, and more at the horizon. Seeing people on the street with a constant gaze into a smartphone, you immediately understand their "horizon"
PubMed (PMID) codes for these studies: 30662838, 12939312, 19901858, 33152389, 16921168, 30521668, 23644222 And for those who have read to the end, a riddle: Why does the human eye distinguish more shades of green than other colors?
