The Effects of Wearing Weak Eyeglasses

Perhaps you've wondered whether wearing weak eyeglasses could damage your eyes. Sure, you may have assumed that things like fatigue might result, but how about the long-term consequences. For many years, optometrists thought that putting children in weak eyeglasses was beneficial as it would slow the deterioration of eyesight. Now evidence suggests something altogether different.

Myopia

• When someone has myopia or is shortsighted, the muscles in his eye are not able to flatten the eye lens sufficiently. The images are supposed to be focused on the retina but instead the images are focused in front, which results in blurred vision. When a person wears eyeglasses or contact lenses, this corrects this problem by moving the image back to the retina.

Eye Elongation

• Scientists discovered that when most people wear glasses and look at objects close-up, their eyes still struggle to focus accurately and the image they see is often focused behind the retina. As time passes, the eye begins to compensate for this error by becoming more elongated, which increases the chance that the individual will suffer from eye disease as well as making distance vision worse.

Undercorrection

• Optometrists believed that they could prevent eyeball elongation in kids by undercorrecting shortsightedness. Their theory was that if the image was focused in front of the retina rather than behind, this would not cause the eyeball to become more elongated. Daniel O'Leary, an optometrist at Anglia Polytechnic University in Cambridge, decided to do further research on the benefit of undercorrection and discovered that the undercorrected eyeballs elongated much faster, in fact 30 percent faster than the eyeballs that were fully corrected with stronger eyeglasses. His conclusion: any kind of blurred vision is going to make myopia worse.

Outcome

• Undercorrection can be a problem for adults as well as children; however, the resulting decline in visual acuity is slower in children than it is in adults. All whose eyes have been undercorrected may have worse eyesight than they would have had because of the trend to undercorrect. Undercorrection does not appear to be an effective therapy in slowing down the rate of early-onset myopic progression, notes the "Clinical Experimental Optometry Journal of the Australian Optometrical Association."