We’re in a short-sightedness epidemic – and we never saw it coming


We’re in a short-sightedness epidemic – and we never saw it coming

Published 19 Feb 2025 Every morning – shortly after checking my phone and shortly before brushing my teeth – I pull down my lower eyelids in turn and smush a contact lens on to each of my eyeballs. I’m pretty good at this by now and can do it without a mirror. After a heartbreaking diagnosis when I was 12 – and a genuinely tragic first pair of glasses – my vision declined throughout my teenage years, finally stabilising at -4.5 dioptres, which means that objects come into focus at 22.22cm (ie one metre divided by 4.5) in front of my face. My eyeballs are the wrong shape. They grew into eggs instead of perfect 24mm spheres. My increased axial length – that’s the distance from my corneas in the front to my retinas at the back – means that objects come into focus in the wrong place. Without contacts or glasses, everything is underwater. Like most of my fellow myopes (people who are short-sighted), I have come to view this as a mild hindrance but a manageable one – as long as I keep up my £15 monthly direct debit to Specsavers. It hadn’t occurred to me until I began speaking to the world’s leading myopia experts that I suffer from a disease. Least of all a preventable disease. Least of all a disease that if left to spread at its current rate will result in millions of people going blind. It sounds alarmist and yet when you look at the numbers, alarm feels appropriate. Necessary, even. The global myopia rate tripled between 1990 and 2023, according to a recent study in the British Journal of Ophthalmology. The World Health Organization predicts that by 2050, half of the world will need glasses and 10 per cent will be high myopic (that’s a -6 dioptre prescription or higher), which carries severe risks of complications and even blindness. “Myopia should absolutely be viewed less as an inconvenience and should take its proper place as a disease,” says Dr Donald Mutti, professor in optometry at Ohio State University. “Not all myopic eyes have the pathologies that threaten vision,” he stresses. “But it’s absolutely the case that myopia increases risk for ocular disease.”