Principal Investigator: Associate Professor Koh Teck Chang, Victor, Ophthalmology
Co-Principal Investigators: Associate Professor Clement Tan and Dr Sun Chen-Hsin, Ophthalmology

The objective of our research is to control the progression of myopia (also known as shortsightedness) in children. Myopia is a type of refractive error due to an excessive elongation of the eyeball. Based on the World report on vision released by the World Health Organization in October 2019, uncorrected refractive error is one of the most common causes amongst 1 billion people with preventable visual impairment. Myopia may impair many aspects of life including educational and occupational activities.The annual global costs of productivity losses associated with vision impairment from uncorrected myopia was estimated to be US$ 244 billion. Moreover, the economic burden of uncorrected myopia in Asia were reported to be more than twice that of other regions and equivalent to more than 1% of gross domestic product.

1. With the advent of tools such as spectacles and lenses, refractive error in myopia can be corrected. However, this does not address the underlying pathology of the elongated eyeball. In high myopia, the elongation stretches and thins the inner parts of the eye, leading to further eye complications such as myopic macular degeneration and retinal detachment, which cause irreversible vision loss. The Beijing Eye Study (2006) has reported myopia related complication being the most common cause of blindness in young people.

2. Myopia progression in children can be controlled via lifestyle interventions such as increasing outdoor time, and the use of atropine eye drops, soft contact lens, ortho-keratology contact lens or peripheral defocus spectacle lens. Specifically, Atropine eye drops have been shown to reduce myopia progression by 50% over 5 years in randomized controlled trial done in Singapore and Hong Kong.

3. The challenge in controlling myopia is that accurate measurement of the degree of myopia in children is cumbersome. As such, this research proposal aims at developing a novel method to measure the length of the eyeball so that the progression of myopia in children can be monitored by their parents at home. This enables ophthalmologists to intervene at an early stage of myopia, thus controlling further progression of axial length of the eyeball. Therefore, this prevents further myopia-related complications which can lead to blindness.