November 22, 2017
Keio University School of Medicine
A research group from the Department of Ophthalmology, Keio University School of Medicine, led by Professor Kazuo Tsubota, Professor Kazuno Negishi, Project Associate Professor Toshihide Kurihara, and Assistant Professor Hidenari Torii, has discovered that violet light may suppress the progression of myopia (axial elongation) in adult patients with high myopia.
In Japan, high myopia is the fourth leading cause of blindness (first-grade visual impairment), according to a 2005 research report by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, and is known to carry a very high risk of blindness. However, there is currently no effective method to suppress axial elongation to control myopia progression in adult patients with high myopia.
This research group has previously reported that violet light may be effective in suppressing axial elongation in young people (aged 13–18). Now, through further research, they have found that violet light may also suppress axial elongation in adult patients with high myopia.
The research group performed phakic intraocular lens implantation, a type of refractive surgery, on adult patients with high myopia and compared the progression of myopia over a five-year postoperative period between two different lens groups. The results showed a significant difference in the amount of axial elongation over the five years post-surgery between the two lens groups. The group compared and examined this difference from multiple perspectives, including higher-order aberrations, residual astigmatism, the spectral transmittance of the phakic intraocular lenses, and off-axis aberration simulations using a model eye. They concluded that there were no significant differences other than in the spectral transmittance of the phakic intraocular lenses, suggesting that the difference in violet light transmittance may have caused the difference in the results.
These research findings suggest that violet light is expected to suppress axial elongation not only in young people but also in adult patients with high myopia, potentially playing a role in preventing blindness.
This research was published in the November 2017 issue of the electronic journal "Scientific Reports."
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