Why does myopia cause retinal detachment

Journal List Community Eye Health v. Community Eye Health. Katie Williams and Christopher Hammond. Find articles by Katie Williams. Find articles by Christopher Hammond. Author information Copyright and License information Disclaimer. This article has been cited by other articles in PMC. Open in a separate window. High myopia increases the risk of potentially blinding eye conditions.

High myopia. Speaking to patients with myopia It is important to make patients aware of these potentially sight-threatening conditions and that their risk appears to be proportionate their degree of myopia. Key messages. References 1. Archives of Ophthalmology. Worldwide prevalence and risk factors for myopia. Retinal detachment due to myopia is more akin to a series of falling dominoes, with myopia at the beginning and retinal detachment only resulting in case others fall in just the right way.

On the other hand, RD can occur in patients with no signs of myopia at all. If you book an appointment in Regina or Grenfell , we can get your child an eye exam and determine whether myopia control can help. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.

Donec odio. Quisque volutpat mattis eros. Nullam malesuada erat ut turpis. Suspendisse urna nibh, viverra non, semper suscipit, posuere a, pede. Donec nec justo eget felis facilisis fermentum. Aliquam porttitor mauris sit amet orci. Aenean dignissim pellentesque felis. Skip to content. Regina , SK How Your Retina Works Your retina is a thin, stretched out membrane spread across the inner wall at the back of your eye.

What is Retinal Detachment? When these cells loosen from the tiny veins supplying your eye oxygen, they can no longer function as they detect light, and you can lose vision.

Posterior vitreous detachment PVD refers to a common phenomenon where the gel-like substance in the main chamber of your eye softens or slowly liquefies and pulls away from your retina. Bowling B, et al. Corneal and refractive surgery. Edinburgh, U. Eye health tips. Gil-Cazorla R, et al. A review of the surgical options for the correction of presbyopia. British Journal of Ophthalmology.

Bower KS. Laser refractive surgery. Frequency of ocular examinations — Recommended eye examination frequency for pediatric patients and adults.

Softing Hataye AL expert opinion. Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn. Overview of refractive error. The Merck Manual Professional Version. Facts about myopia. Accessed April 5, Huang, J, et al. Efficacy comparison of 16 interventions for myopia control in children.

Foster PJ, et al. Epidemiology of myopia. Figure Seven retrospective studies, four case only, and three case—control studies reported on the association between myopia and visual field loss progression Fig. OAG patients with normotensive intraocular pressure under treatment were included in all studies, and follow-up length ranged from 2 to 10 years.

Myopia was identified as a risk factor for visual field progression in OAG in three studies. Different refractive error categories were indicated by orange patterns. Patients were categorized as myopic if refractive error category was unavailable.

Doshi et al. Vision loss from any cause in myopia was investigated in only a few studies. A study using data from the Rotterdam Study, performed in The Netherlands, showed that An overall risk of visual impairment was reported, which increased myopia degree OR, 0.

The cumulative risk of visual impairment or blindness increased from 6. Kaplan—Meier curve of the cumulative risk of visual impairment with increasing age per category of AL left and SER right. Association of axial length with risk of uncorrectable visual impairment for Europeans with myopia. JAMA Ophthalmol. The risk of these complications was not only increased for high myopia, but also for low or moderate myopia. MMD was by far the most hazardous complication.

Emmetropic eyes, which served as the reference, did not develop MMD, which hampered interpretation of the high-risk estimates for myopes. Frequency data on MMD could be more informative, but nonuniform definitions, highly variable age distributions of study participants, and the potential selection bias due to hospital recruitment caused large heterogeneity in prevalence estimates.

MMD prevalence ranged from 0. Our meta-analysis revealed an increased risk for RD in all myopia groups, with higher risk for those with more severe myopia. The OR for moderate myopia was already 8. Frequency data of RD per degree of myopia were limited in literature, but Japan and Taiwan reported remarkably higher incidence rates of RD than other countries with a lower myopia prevalence.

Our meta-analysis identified a strong association between myopia, PSC, and nuclear cataract, but not between myopia and cortical cataract. Three mechanisms have been proposed to explain the relationship between myopia and cataract.

First, myopic eyes may be exposed to a higher level of oxidative stress caused by faster vitreous liquefaction, or by a decreased level of glutathione, an antioxidative agent in the lens of myopic eyes leading to cataract formation. This mechanism seems less plausible because the aqueous humor also provides nutrients to the lens. In myopic patients, however, reports suggest an increased risk of postsurgery RD, as CE causes a disruption of the capsular-zonular diaphragm and vitreous traction of a thin peripheral retina may then predispose to RD in myopes.

After vitreous removal in high myopes zonular weakness may occur, leading to potential zonular instability. In addition, sculpting maneuvers may be more difficult due to a deeper anterior chamber. The positive association between myopia and OAG is in line with previous reports.

The underlying mechanism for a predisposition to OAG is still unclear. Considering the differences in study design and definitions myopic OAG may unlikely progress to central visual field defects. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic review and meta-analysis regarding complications associated with myopia. One of the strengths is the completeness of our literature search. We believe that we included all observational studies performed from — in the meta-analyses.

Another asset is the estimations of risk per refractive error category, which elucidated the profound risk increase for the higher degrees of myopia, but also revealed substantial risks for the much more common low and moderate myopia. Limitations of our study include the different definitions used for myopic complications, in particular for MMD and OAG.

We strived to use the recently defined guidelines by the International Myopia Institute to optimize uniformity between studies, but sometimes had to apply best clinical judgement if this was not possible. Another limitation was the lack of multimodal imaging to detect all retinal complications; most studies only used color fundus photographs.

In particular, retinoschisis, macular hole, different types of staphylomas, and peripheral lesions are better visualized with other imaging techniques, such as optical coherence tomography and wide-field imaging. We expect that future studies will provide more results using newer and multimodal imaging techniques. Finally, although AL is more closely related to myopic complications than refractive error, we could not study this for most complications, as data on eye biometry were missing.

Regarding clinical management, the results from our meta-analyses suggest that vision-threatening complications can appear from moderate myopia onward. There is a strong relationship between myopia degree, age of the participant, and visual impairment; more severe myopia results in an earlier onset of visual-threatening complications. A period of 20 years between diagnosis and perimetric blindness was estimated for OAG patients with average visual field loss progression.

This literature review and meta-analyses provide detailed risk estimates of myopic complications. One in three high myopes is at risk of bilateral low vision with age. Low and moderate myopes are less likely to develop such a severe visual outcome; nevertheless, they are at significant risk to develop MMD, RD, cataract, and OAG. This not only affects the individual patient, it has a major impact on health care and society, in particular because future generations may become even more myopic.

Awareness of the complications of myopia among patients, physicians, and policy makers is crucial, and a global strategy for prevention and treatment of myopia progression should become a priority. The funding organizations had no role in the design or conduct of this research.

They provided unrestricted grants. None of the authors have financial disclosures that relate to this manuscript. Disclosure: A. Haarman , None; C. Enthoven , None; J. Tideman , None; M. Tedja , None; V. Verhoeven , None; C. Klaver , None. Morgan I, Rose K. How genetic is school myopia?

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