For her research on myopia, Barbara Swiatczak, a postdoctoral researcher in our Myopia Research Group has received the Swiss OphthAward 2022 in the Category Highest Clinical Relevance.
Together with Frank Schaeffel, Barbara Swiatczak is researching reasons why eye growth control mechanisms fail, causing continued eyeball elongation and myopia development.
“We believe that understanding the functional changes in the myopic retina is fundamental to develop evidence-based interventions that can be implemented into every day’s visual experience”, says Barbara Swiatczak.
Since reading is one of the well-known risk factors of myopia, the goal of the study by Barbara Swiatczak and Frank Schaeffel was to optimize features of a text, which may still have a positive impact on inhibition of myopia progression in already myopic eyes. They were able to describe short-term (already after 30 min!) changes in the axial length in the eyes of young adult human subjects when they read text with different contrast polarities (standard contrast – dark letters on bright background; and inverted contrast – bright letters on dark background) and two different letter sizes (“small text” ≈ 13 arcmin, which corresponds to the letter size in a smartphone and “large text” ≈ 34 arcmin, which corresponds to the letter size in a book).
It was found that the retina responds to the reading of “large” inverted contrast text with eye shortening, which was associated with overstimulation of the ON channel in the retinal pathways and possibly with inhibition of myopia progression.
In an earlier study, Swiatczak and Schaeffel have shown that the myopic retina no longer generates inhibitory signals for eye growth when a positive lens is placed in front of the eye. Therefore, they now demonstrated that undercorrection does not cause eye growth inhibition in young adult myopes as hoped before. However, reading “large” text with inverted contrast may have a beneficial effect on slowing myopia progression since it made eyes transiently shorter, no matter whether they were myopic or emmetropic.