> and people don't tend to talk about it as one does a medical condition
While I basically entirely agree with your comment, my partner (who is an optometrist here in Australia) would often point out to me that myopia is a big risk factor for retinal degeneration and detachment, open angle glaucoma, and cataracts at a young age. So while we definitely shouldn't treat mild myopia (like I, and likely you have) as some horrific medical condition, she also gets a bit frustrated by general practitioners and retail optoms who don't treat a lot of the eye diseases she handles with the gravity some of them actually should bear.
Anyway this is a massive tangent, just was something interesting I wanted to share!
Fascinating. Seems to me that it would be a comorbidity with a common cause though, rather than the myopia being the causative factor?
My (somewhat loosely informed) intuition suggests to me that in the same way that not spending enough time exposing the eye to light outdoors increases the severity of myopia, it would likely be causative in those other degenerations. Use it or lose it!
Not that I know anyone who spent all of their childhood with nose in a book then graduated to a computer, cough... I say this having quite mild myopia, although I wear glasses still, can't stand a blurry world.
So I just asked my partner, and what she explained was myopia is basically caused by/a symptom of axial elongation of the eye, which is also what can cause the bigger diseases I spoke about initially! Ortho-K/myopia control as a kid/young adult can help fix/arrest the continued development of this, though thats now well outside what I understand of the topic haha
While I basically entirely agree with your comment, my partner (who is an optometrist here in Australia) would often point out to me that myopia is a big risk factor for retinal degeneration and detachment, open angle glaucoma, and cataracts at a young age. So while we definitely shouldn't treat mild myopia (like I, and likely you have) as some horrific medical condition, she also gets a bit frustrated by general practitioners and retail optoms who don't treat a lot of the eye diseases she handles with the gravity some of them actually should bear.
Anyway this is a massive tangent, just was something interesting I wanted to share!