“Children should be seen, not heard.” This saying conjures up an endearing image, of laughing, shouting children on playgrounds and streets, with their parents trying to quell their high energy levels and indeed, decibel levels.
Today, the scene is quite different. Children are riveted to their computers and cellphones. Games, playgrounds and physical activity are forgotten preserves.
This reduction in physical activity and increase in “near activities” are believed to have caused a spike in the incidence of refractive error. A U.S. study has shown that myopia (near-sight) has increased from 25 per cent to 41.6 per cent, an increase of 66 per cent in 30 years. An Indian study has demonstrated that in children below 15 years the prevalence of myopia was 4.4 per cent and that of astigmatism 6.93 per cent.
In short , due to a preponderance of ‘near activities’ children today are at a much higher risk of developing refractive error than earlier generations.
When the eye care institution of which I am a part conducts school screening camps we see many children with refractive error. Some children complain to parents of their inability to see the blackboard in the classroom. This is often not taken seriously by parents, since they themselves had no refractive error.
This neglect of refractive error would lead to amblyopia, or ‘lazy eye’. Amblyopia is a unilateral decrease of best-corrected vision, caused by form vision deprivation. In layman’s language, the blurred image formed in the eye owing to refractive error is suppressed by the brain, thus causing vision in that eye to become defective.
This is entirely avoidable by means of early treatment of refractive error. Amblyopia has emerged as a common cause of impaired vision in children, affecting 2 to 4 per cent of them.
The usual method of treatment is occlusion therapy that involves patching of the eye with the better vision to force the other eye to see. But amblyopia can usually be corrected only up to the teenage years. So the earlier the age of detection, the better the chances of a cure.
A few simple precautions could help avoid the problem:
Have an annual eye examination for children. |
Take a lesson from T20 cricket (on a lighter vein). Follow the 20-20 rule: get children to take a 20- second break from the computer every 20 minutes. |
Maintain an eye-distance of 18 to 28 inches from the computer screen. |
Maintain a distance of 7 to 9 feet from the television screen. |
Encourage physical activity among children: games, dancing and so on. |
Limit “near activities“, such as working on computers, texting and watching television, to two hours daily. |
To conclude with yet another aphorism, prevention is better than cure. |
