A new Queensland optometry study has started in Brisbane, aiming to explore how lifestyle and environmental factors affect the eyesight of pre-myopic Australian children, an understudied cohort in myopia research.
The project has been funded through a US$250,000 Meta Myopia Award from the American Academy of Optometry Foundation to Queensland University of Technology (QUT) optometry researcher, Dr Rohan Hughes.
The research team will follow more than 100 children with pre-myopia aged six to 12 for one year, tracking their eye growth and vision changes, along with behaviours including screen time and reading, outdoor play, diet, and sleep.
Rather than use surveys to quantify near work duration and working distances, Dr Hughes said the project will use wearable sensors alongside questionnaires to follow the children’s activities, and regular eye scans to measure eye growth.
“In addition, there have been some suggestions that other factors like sleep quality and quantity, and nutrition may have some association with myopia, so we are intending to explore these factors too,” Dr Hughes told mivision.
FOCUS ON PRE-MYOPIC CHILDREN
Dr Hughes said the project would focus on premyopic children who were identified as particularly at risk of developing myopia, due to their current eyesight, age, and/or hereditary risk factors.
It’s estimated that approximately half the world’s population will have myopia by 2050.1
“That’s why it’s really important for us to better understand the reasons why children develop myopia and use that knowledge to help improve preventative measures and education,” Dr Hughes said.
“The cause of myopia is thought to be multifactorial – we think it involves a complex interaction between genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors. But these characteristics are not fully understood.
“Many children and adults spend less time outdoors than people used to, and more time indoors doing close-up work like reading and screen time.
“Often this near-distance work is done for long periods and in poor conditions. Kids often hold materials really close to their eyes, they do work in poor lighting, and they don’t take enough breaks to rest their eyes.
"This study will comprehensively quantify many ocular, environmental, and lifestyle characteristics that have been shown to be associated with myopia development, and explore their association with eye growth and refractive error change in children with pre-myopia,” Dr Hughes said.
“We hope this project will provide insights that can contribute to strategies to delay or prevent myopia development in children.”
Dr Hughes said around 20% of children in Australia were already near-sighted by the age of 12.
“In some east Asian countries like Singapore, China and Hong Kong, myopia prevalence in 12-year-olds is around 50–60%,” Dr Hughes said.
“We think Australian children are developing myopia more slowly than East Asian children because Australian kids still spend more time outdoors, we have less urbanisation, and we have less demanding educational culture and systems.”
The research project, which is titled Characteristics associated with eye growth in pre-myopic children, began in June and will run until June 2027.
The research will be conducted through the Contact Lens and Visual Optics Laboratory (CLVOL) within the QUT Centre for Vision and Eye Research, with recruitment planned to commence later in 2025. Further information is available from Dr Hughes: rp.hughes@qut.edu.au.
Reference available at mivision.com.au.