Singapore eye doctors help brighten the world for myopic children

With four in five young adults in Singapore living with myopia – a condition of the eye that makes faraway objects appear blurred – it was little wonder researchers at the Singapore Eye Research Institute (Seri) made myopia its key study focus.

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"It was chosen because it was such a big problem as we now know," said Professor Donald Tan, a former director of Seri.

In 1997, the newly set up institute carried out the first clinical trials on national servicemen when they came in for enlistment.

"We found that three-quarters of them were myopic. That means three-quarters of our young population were short-sighted," said Prof Tan, who is now in private practice and a clinical professor at the Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences Academic Clinical Programme at Duke-NUS Medical School.

Seri is the research institute of the Singapore National Eye Centre and is affiliated to the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and Duke-NUS Medical School. Myopia is caused by an elongation of the eyeball and is usually treated with corrective lenses.

Studies estimate that on average, 30 per cent of the world is myopic and, by 2050, almost half will be.

The hot spots for myopia are East and South-east Asia, where places such as South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, China and Japan have a prevalence of between 80 and 90 per cent.

Seri professor of ophthalmology research Saw Seang-Mei said: "Because we have had high rates of myopia for such a long time, we have a lot more experience than many other Asian countries in de-