Abstract
Presentation Description :
How the visual environment affects the growth of the eye and influences refractive error in humans remains inadequately understood. Reviving ideas proposed in the nineteenth century, recent studies are examining time spent outdoors as an anti-myopia strategy in children. The effects of light at night on general health are now thought to derive from effects on biological rhythms, and much data have identified daily rhythms in axial length and choroidal thickness in normal eyes of humans and animals that become altered in experimental ametropias. We have found that the chick eye’s growth responses to brief exposures to visual stimuli such as retinal defocus or form deprivation depend on the time of day of exposure, and that the rhythms in eye length and choroidal thickness are altered in different ways. Similarly, brief periods of light at night affect eye growth and ocular rhythms. This talk will describe the various effects on rhythm parameters of phase and amplitude that are associated with ocular growth changes, and relate these biometric observations to recent and ongoing molecular studies of retinal dopamine metabolism and ocular clock genes. We will also describe how time-of-day of administration influences the effectiveness of two drugs that inhibit myopia in animal models.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2018 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Honolulu, Hawaii, April 29 - May 3, 2018.