Makes sense

That makes sense. I can see the hesitation about replacing the lenses of an otherwise healthy eye

though where I grew up it’s very unlikely to see anything close to horizon-distance without being at a beach

It would be interesting to see if people who live im these sorts of areas have higher rates of myopia. I’m not aware of any data that’s been collected on this though

The 80-90% claim seems to be repeated in various areas on the internet, including by the American Academy of Ophthalmology, which I assume to be reputable:

Over recent decades, the prevalence of myopia has skyrocketed, particularly in Asia. In countries like China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan, up to 80-90% of teenagers and young adults are now myopic.

Of course these local averages are still consistent with a lower global average

It’s just not a great idea to do surgery for something that can still be corrected with glasses.

Well I generally agree, there are people who elect to get laser eye surgery. Is this procedure generally considered more risky than laser eye surgery?

Is this procedure ever performed on someone with healthy cataracts to improve their eyesight?

No. Interestingly once myopia does start developing this doesn’t seem to slow the progression. It seems to be good for prevention and that’s it

Considering that a fairly large percentage of children develop myopia (as high as 80-90% in some countries) a 45% reduction would be fairly significant, no? Or am I missing something

That’s fascinating. Is it typical for cataract surgery to cause near 20-20 vision or is this something that just happened to you because you have a unique eye shape?

Being from a sunny country lowers the chance of it (so you’re less likely to be nearsighted if you’re from Spain compared to Norway), even when controlled for hours spent outdoors.

This is very interesting

Wow I didn’t realize that cataract surgery can improve your vision that dramatically. I thought cataracts surgery was something typically reserved for seniors to prevent foggy vision

You can establish causation even if you don’t know what the mechanism is. I don’t know to what extent causation has been established here though, I’m not familiar enough with the research. But at minimum the intuitive idea that there is a noncausative correlation because with bad eyesight choose to stay inside more does not seem to stand, since this phenomenon can exist at a population level (so countries where schools start younger - and kids go outside less - have significantly higher rates of myopia).

A third idea is that sunlight is much, much brighter than most indoor artificial light

Would this mean it’s a bad idea to give kids sunglasses?

Does the meta analysis say anything about which effect is most likely the cause?

Not that I saw though I admit I didn’t read the whole thing

Yeah that was a typo. Edited the title to fix it, should be correct now

But this also kind of feels to me like something that could go the other way- myopic kids are less likely to go outside

It’s not just individual kids they are measuring, but entire populations of children and at what age they start school. The younger kids are when they start school, the more likely they are to be myopic, and this contributes to significant differences in the prevalence in myopia across countries (Edit: I should have stated this explicitly, but this is because more time in school means less time outside, generally speaking)

If this is just a correlation this would have to be a correlation at the population level. Countries where kids start school later on (e.g. 7 years old) have significantly lower rates of myopia than countries that start school early on in a child’s development (e.g. 3 years old). It’s still possible that this is a correlation, but the correlation would have to be capturing something deeper than just an individual kids screen time. Granted, this correlation would still need to account for differences between individual kids, but it would also need to account for differences between kids at a population level. It’s hard to see what could be causing this correlation though. So maybe there’s something there we’re just not seeing, but at a certain point though the idea that there is a causal relationship starts to seem like the most plausible explanation for explaining this data

Another idea is that when you’re outside, you spend more time focusing on objects further away, which helps develop those eye muscles

Would a graph depicting Africa’s population growth also look like comedy to you? Because it would look pretty similar to that graph too

McGill is a high ranking English language university in Montreal

Yeah but the populations in these countries is declining or will be soon. Just look at Japan for example. Whereas population growth in Africa accounts for most of the population growth of humanity as a whole in the coming century. Source: UN population projections