VIDEO: Challenges of diagnosing myopia

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We know that myopia’s onset is typically in childhood, typically between the ages of eight to 12, but it can have its onset even younger. The odd thing is that children are not particularly reliable historians. So it’s not like suddenly the kid is going, ‘Oh, the leaves on that tree are really blurry,’ or I can’t see what the teacher’s doing at the front of the classroom,’ because they don’t know any different and they’re not very good at comparing how their vision was before they started to become myopic. And it’s not like they nudge the guy next to them and say, ‘Hey kid, can you see the front of that classroom or what that teacher’s doing?’

It has to be diagnosed largely at an eye examination. And we are not, in the United States, in a really good habit of making sure, for example, that all children need to have an eye examination before they start school. So it’s often diagnosed even in a school screening, say, by a school nurse who measures the kid’s vision far away and the child can’t see and then they report it to parents. And even a nearsighted parent themselves might hear from it from a casual encounter like that, rather than from an eye examination.

So if a parent wants to be certain that their child is not myopic or to know when their child first becomes myopic, an eye examination by an eye care practitioner is really the way to go.