Nearsightedness Risk Can Be Less In Children Who Like To Play Outdoors

Just adding an extra everyday outdoor activity to children's schedules can help to prevent nearsightedness, according to hngn.

After three years of adding outdoor activities for children in Guangzhou, China, it was observed that it had a statistically significant influence on their vision, reducing the rates of myopia (nearsightedness), the JAMA Network Journals  reported.

Myopia is supposed to have touched high levels in young adults who lived in far-off cities in East and Southeast Asia, and also seems to be shooting up in European and Middle Eastern nations.

Even though no clear solution is in sight for curing myopia, adding some outdoor activities could help.

"Given the popular appeal of increased outdoor activities to improve the health of school-aged children in general, the potential benefit of slowing myopia development and progression by those same activities is difficult to ignore. Although prescribing this approach with the intent of helping to prevent myopia would appear to have no risk, parents should understand that the magnitude of the effect is likely to be small and the durability is uncertain," said Michael Repka, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in an accompanying editorial.

Studying children from grades 1 and 12 in six intervention schools and six control schools, scientists probed the activities of children by giving students of the intervention schools an additional 40-minute class of activities per day, while their parents asked them to get involved in outdoor activities after school hours as well as during holidays. The children in control schools also continued their "regular pattern", according to hngn.

The scientists found that in the three years, about 259 cases of myopia were discovered among 853 participants in the intervention group, even as 287 cases were discovered among 726 participants in the control group. The change in the "spherical equivalent refraction (myopic shift)" was found to be less in the intervention group than in the control group.

"Our study achieved an absolute difference of 9.1 percent in the incidence rate of myopia, representing a 23 percent relative reduction in incident myopia after 3 years, which was less than the anticipated reduction. However, this is clinically important because small children who develop myopia early are most likely to progress to high myopia, which increases the risk of pathological myopia. Thus a delay in the onset of myopia in young children, who tend to have a higher rate of progression, could provide disproportionate long-term eye health benefits," the authors wrote.

However, more research is needed to check and assess the long-term effects of outdoor activities.