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<\/div>I vividly remember getting my first pair of glasses as a child. My mum is very near-sighted and dispatched me to the optician every year. My older sister was diagnosed at around the age of 8 and I prayed I wouldn\u2019t follow suit for fear of being made fun of, but by the time I was the same age, the world was becoming a blur. That year\u2019s visit to the optician confirmed it, and I have worn glasses or contact lenses ever since.<\/p>\n
Back then, in the late 1970s, it was quite unusual to need glasses at such a young age. Not any more. Over the past 30 years, there has been a surge in near-sightedness, or myopia, especially among children. Today, around a third of 5 to 19-year-olds are myopic, up from a quarter in 1990. If that trend continues, the rate will be about 40 per cent by 2050<\/a> \u2013 or 740 million myopic young people.<\/p>\n That is more than an inconvenience. \u201cMyopia is a disease,\u201d says K. Davina Frick<\/a> at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Maryland, who co-chaired a recent US National Academy of Sciences committee on the condition<\/a>. \u201cIt has wide-reaching quality-of-life and economic implications<\/a>,\u201d she says, not least the risk of going blind in severe cases. Increasingly, however, researchers think the epidemic can be slowed \u2013 or even reversed.<\/p>\n Most cases of myopia are axial, meaning the axis of the eyeball \u2013 the distance between the cornea at the front and the light-sensitive retina at the back \u2013 grows too long. This means that light entering the eye is focused in front of the\u2026<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n