Myopia Prevention with Progressive Lenses

For those whom has being reading our blog, you would have noticed a news feed that shouts.

No-line bifocals may slow myopia progression in some children

It further went to summarise the info as follows :

"In the PAL group, progression averaged -2.01 D overall and was not related to the number of myopic parents, the authors said. Among children with two myopic parents, myopia progression in the PAL group was significantly less than the SVL group, they noted."

The report further reads that children with two myopic parents has their myopia controlled with the use of progressive lenses better than children with one or no parents with myopia. I am not sure if this research looks puzzling to you, but it sure does to me. What was the original motivation of the researcher, as to find out the effectiveness of progressive lenses based on the parent's myopia characteristics.

Upon further research, it became clear. This research was part of COMET, an ambitious 5 year, multi-centre reseach on the effectiveness of progressive lenses on myopia control with 232 subjects. In the course of research, many variables were collected such as parentage, age, gender etc so as to allow the researchers to draw a co-relation of progressive lense' effectiveness to as many variables as possible. In this case, parentage myopia history was identified.

The problem with such a research methodology is, it sometimes throws out very interesting results. For instance, if the colour preference of the subjects were collected, you may have results suggesting "subjects whose myopia is controlled better with progressive lenses tends to like blue"; or even "subjects whose myopia is controlled better with progressive lenses prefers Mcdonalds to Burger King, or vice-versa."

Hence in the actual research findings by Dr Kurtz and his team, they rightly pointed out that their results can only be taken as "exploratory" instead of "conclusive". It is important to put the result of this research in its right context.