Correlation Between Myopia Progression and the Outdoors

The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), also known as the Children of the 90s study, followed nearly 7000 children in Great Britain and found that those who spent little time outdoors daily at 8-9 years of age were 40% more likley to develop myopia by age 15 than those who spent 3 hours a day or more outdoors in the summer and more than 1 hour daily in teh winter. (Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 2012; 53:2856-2865).

Time spent outdoors reduces the likelihood that children will develop myopia, possibly because light levels are much higher outdoors than indoors. To test this hypothesis, the effects of high ambient lighting on vision-induced myopia in monkeys were determined in this study