myopia tagged posts

Clinical trial suggests low-dose atropine is effective myopia treatment. The results of a new clinical trial suggest that the first drug therapy to slow the progression of nearsightedness in kids could be on the horizon.

The three-year study found that a daily drop in each eye of a low dose of atropine, a drug used to dilate pupils, was better than a placebo at limiting eyeglass prescription changes and inhibiting elongation of the eye in nearsighted children aged 6 to 10.

That elongation leads to myopia, or nearsightedness, which starts in young kids and continues to get worse into the teen years before leve...

Image of a ON Delayed retinal ganglion cell colored by its depth in the retina. Arrowheads point out the unique “recursive” morphology of the dendrites that snake up and down.

Northwestern Medicine scientists have discovered a cell in the retina that may cause myopia when it dysfunctions. The dysfunction may be linked to the amount of time a child spends indoors and away from natural light. “This discovery could lead to a new therapeutic target to control myopia,” said Greg Schwartz, lead investigator and assistant professor of ophthalmology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine...

This is an antibody-stained cross section of a mouse retina. Credit: Andrei Tkachenko/Columbia University Medical Center

Vision researchers have discovered a gene that causes myopia, but only in people who spend a lot of time in childhood reading or doing other ‘nearwork.’ Using a database of approximately 14,000 people, the researchers found that those with a certain variant of the gene – called APLP2 – were 5X more likely to develop myopia in their teens if they had read an hour or more each day in their childhood. Those who carried the APLP2 risk variant but spent less time reading had no additional risk of developing myopia.

This is the first known evidence of gene-environment interaction in myopia,” says Andrei Tkatchenko, MD, PhD, of CUMC...