Key lines of discovery in myopia research

Schaeffel, Frank, Guggenheim, Jeremy ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5164-340X, Stone, Richard A. and Wildsoet, Christine F. 2025. Key lines of discovery in myopia research. Ophthalmic and Physiological Optics 10.1111/opo.13508

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Abstract

Myopia was considered a largely inherited condition in the 1970s when it was found by accident that monkeys became myopic when their eyes were deprived of spatial vision. The implication of this observation, that sufficient spatial visual information is a necessary prerequisite for normal refractive development, was confirmed by cross-sectional observations in children with unilateral visual distortion, for example, by ptosis or corneal opacity, and by experiments in chickens, tree shrews, mice and guinea pigs, as well as additional experiments in rhesus monkeys (1978–2006). When retinal image contrast and/or spatial detail were restricted, so-called form deprivation myopia developed rapidly. It was to become the most frequently used paradigm in animal myopia model studies for many years. Evidence that a direct retinal–scleral pathway underlies these altered growth responses, and that the visual regulation of eye growth more generally came from three different lines of research: (1) that deprivation confined to a local retinal area induced ‘local’ myopia, as demonstrated by local eye shape changes in chickens, guinea pigs and monkeys (1987–2015). Furthermore, deprivation myopia develops after either (2) the optic nerve was first sectioned to isolate the eye from the brain (chickens, guinea pigs; 1988–2020) or (3) retinal ganglion cells (and epithelial transport) were silenced by intravitreal tetrodotoxin injection (chickens, tree shrews 1990–1995).

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Schools > Optometry and Vision Sciences
Publisher:	Wiley
ISSN:	0275-5408
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	10 April 2025
Date of Acceptance:	30 March 2025
Last Modified:	25 Apr 2025 15:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/177579

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