Optometrists mark rise in short-sightedness and sight issues after COVID-19 lockdowns

Custom Eyecare Newcastle managing director and optometrist Heidi Hunter said the number of myopic children visiting her practice had doubled in the past two years, which she put down to a growth in referrals for her practice's myopic clinic but also the increased prevalence of myopia - the elongation of the eyeball - believed to be tied to spending more time indoors and the use of digital devices, which is starting at an increasingly young age.

"Research shows that spending too little time outdoors and too much time on a screen are really big risk factors for myopia starting and myopia progressing," Ms Hunter said.

"If all you do is show your eyes an up-close world then of course they're going to adapt to make that up-close world as easy as possible."

Ms Hunter said 50 per cent of the world's population was predicted to be short sighted by 2050.

"They think this pandemic is going to bring that forward," she said. "We can't turn back what's happened in the last couple of years, but we can remind our kids' eyes that there's a big world outside and it's further away than your screen."

Ms Hunter said while myopic adults were likely to notice their distance vision becoming blurry, children often didn't realise anything was wrong.

They might squint, frown or strain to see items in the distance or have to move closer to the school whiteboard or TV to see it clearly.

"If they're naturally pretty introverted, they may be the kids that just lose their confidence and don't try very hard when it comes to sport or don't want to play soccer with their friends and if they're kids who are naturally a little bit mischievous, they may be the kids who say 'I can't see what the teacher's writing, so I'll pick my nose and distract my friends'."

She said she recommended children who didn't exhibit any indications or have family history of vision problems to have their eyesight tested every two years, while those who did exhibit signs or had a genetic predisposition to myopia to be tested every year.

"It's not something that's stagnant, short sightedness is based on the shape and size of your eyes," she said. "So as you grow, you could be in year two and have no signs of short sightedness, but it doesn't mean by year four your eyes haven't become short sighted and you're having trouble, so it's not tick and flick that you can have the kids' eyes tested starting kindy and it's done. It tends to change. But the biggest reason to get kids' eyes tested is because they don't verbalise it like adults."

She said myopic children would be prescribed glasses, but it was also important to slow the progression of the condition, such as by using lenses made of rigid material to mould the eye into a new shape.

"The research shows that as an eyeball stretches it's unhealthy for the retina and unhealthy for the parts of the inside of the eye, they're not designed to be stretched," she said.

"The more stretched they are the more fragile they are, the more likely you are to end up with retinal detachments as an adult and the risk of glaucoma increases.

"Your eyeballs need to last your lifetime because they're not something that's easy to replace."

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