Half the World’s Population Will Become Short-sighted by 2050!

If current trends continue, half the world’s population could be short-sighted in three decades from now, while one-fifth of the population will have a significantly increased risk of blindness…

According to the latest research, it is expected that from 2000 to 2050, there will be a seven times greater prevalence of myopia among the people, but scientists still can not answer specifically why.
The first thing that comes to mind is the generational infatuation with computer screens and mobile phones, but things are not quite so simple.
The number of cases of myopia between the 1970s and early 2000s almost doubled in the US, while in certain specific areas of Asia the increase was even more dramatic.
A recent survey reveals that 96% of teenagers in South Korea are short-sighted, while in Singapore, China and Japan the degree of myopia among teenagers is around 80-90 percent.
Survey data show that in 2000 some 1,406,000 people were diagnosed with myopia (22.9 percent of the world population).
– We forecast that by 2050 the number will rise to 4,758,000 people with myopia (49.8 percent of the world’s population), and 938 million will have high myopia – the scientists said.
These changes are for now explained with the “environmental factors, particularly lifestyle changes, which resulted in the combination of a reduced amount of time spent outdoors, and an increased amount of what we do inside, along with other things.”
The worst thing is not the time spent in front of screens, because myopia began to grow before the era of smartphones and massive spread of computers, but the reduced amount of time spent outdoors.


Taken from: http://www.avaz.ba/