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Updated: Aug 9, 2026
Binocular Dynamic Visual Acuity in Eyeglass-Corrected Myopic Patients
Published on: March 29, 2022
A cohort study of incident myopia in Singaporean children
Seang-Mei Saw1, Anoop Shankar, Say-Beng Tan
1Department of Community, Occupational, and Family Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore. cofsawsm@nus.edu.sg
Purpose:
To determine the risk factors of incident myopia in a school-based cohort study in Singaporean children.
Methods:
A 3-year prospective cohort study was conducted in Singaporean school children aged 7 to 9 years in three schools at entry. Chinese children without myopia at baseline (n = 994) were included in the analysis. The main outcome was incident myopia, defined as spherical equivalent (SE) at least -0.75 D based on cycloplegic autorefraction. Other definitions of incident myopia, at least -0.5 D and at least -1.0 D, were also assessed.
Results:
After controlling for school, age, gender, income, reading in books per week and intelligence quotient (IQ) test scores, we found the relative risk (RR) of incident myopia defined as -0.75 D to be 1.55 (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.18-2.04) for two versus no myopic parents. The multivariate RR of myopia for IQ in the third versus first tertile was 1.50 (95% CI, 1.19-1.89). However, the RR of incident myopia was 1.01 (95% CI, 0.97-1.05) for every unit increase in books read per week. Similar results were obtained with definitions of -0.5 and -1.0 D for incident myopia.
Conclusions:
These data provide new prospective evidence of essential links between parental myopia, IQ scores and subsequent myopia development. However, reading in books per week was not associated with incident myopia.
