Abstract

It has been shown in numerous studies that axial eye elongation and myopia can be induced in young experimental animals by depriving their developing eyes of high contrast and form vision using plastic, translucent goggles or lid suture. Previous studies in chickens,¹ tree shrews ² and monkeys ³ suggest that the susceptibility to form vision deprivation (the amount of myopia induced per time) is at a maximum during early neonatal life (after hatching in chicks, 15 days after eye opening in tree shrews) and declines rapidly with age. The relevance of these findings to human juvenile myopia, however, has not been demonstrated. First, human myopia usually starts to develop later in life, predominantly between 8-16 years, in many cases after the eye has fully grown.⁴ Second, visual conditions similar to those during form vision deprivation are rarely eperienced by young humans. Thus the mechanism(s) producing juvenile human myopia may be different from the mechanism(s) producing goggle induced myopia in young animals. In fact, late onset juvenile myopia is likely not related to form deprivation myopia at all.

© 1997 Optical Society of America