Research Shows Just One Hour of Screen Time Increases Risk of Nearsightedness

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by MedicalXpress.

Each hour a person spends squinting into a smartphone or staring at a screen increases their risk of nearsightedness, a new evidence review suggests.

Every daily one-hour increment in digital screen time is associated with 21% higher odds of myopia, researchers report in JAMA Network Open.

What’s more, the risk continues to increase as more time each day is spent with screens, researchers found.

“Myopia risk increased significantly from one to four hours of screen time and then rose more gradually thereafter,” the research team led by Young Kook Kim, an associate professor of ophthalmology with the Seoul National University College of Medicine in South Korea, wrote.

The risk of nearsightedness is doubled for people who spend four or more hours with a screen every day, results show.

For the new paper, researchers pooled data from 45 prior studies involving more than 335,000 people.

The data showed a significant dose-response association. In other words, the more time people spend with screens, the greater their risk of nearsightedness.

Source: MedicalXpress
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-02-hour-screen-nearsightedness.html