K (F/11) came to fit a pair of lenses onto her sports glasses. She has worn her existing pair of glasses for about 1.5 years in which optometrist suggested for an eye examination. She reported no complaint with existing glasses.
Examination showed that K has a significant increase of short-sighted power. When asked to recall her vision at school before MCO and after MCO, she mentioned that vision after MCO is indeed slightly blurrier. She also reported that she notices a lot of her friends are moving to the front of classroom to look at the projector screens after MCO. And she thought that it is normal for her to move to the front too. This is a clue of power increment and in need of an eye examination that we can pick up from our children.
When asked what we suggest, we recommend to go about myopia control management, to utilise myopia control lenses instead of a single vision lens. Single vision lens is one power lens optimised for far vision, correcting our short-sighted power. When we look at near, our eyes will auto correct by auto focusing to help to see near clearly. But when we look at near continuously using a single vision lens(this lens power that is optimised for far vision), the image from near falls behind our retina.. this sends signal for our eyes to elongate.. eyeball gets longer, it means power increase. What this myopia control lens does is.. to let the near image to fall back in front of retina to prevent having this signal that stimulates the elongation of eyeball.
Myopia control also talks about lifestyle modification such as 20-20-20 rules or having regular breaks in between near work as well as having daily outdoor play is crucially important.
For significant increase of short-sighted power, if she has complain of headache, then we would recommend to visit an ophthalmologist/eye doctor to do cycloplegic refraction, to instil an eye drop to paralyse eye muscles temporarily in order to get the eye power to investigate for pseudomyopia. For K, she has no complain of headache. Parents are anxious about the power increment and will bring K to visit an ophthalmologist.
K’s eyes are all healthy, her eye has pigmentation on conjuctiva(the whitish part of our eyes). Many people have this pigmentation, so we will document & monitor accordingly.
Thank you K, Mr Gobbi & wifey for dropping by?
