Myopia is a condition affecting the eye that results in far away objects appearing blurred. The condition is more commonly known as nearsightedness. Myopia symptoms include sharp vision for close objects with blurriness increasing as distance increases. The symptoms of myopia are often solved by contact lenses or glasses, although surgery is sometimes used.
Myopia is caused by the eyeball becoming too long, which means that the focal point of the lens isn’t in the correct place. People with good, long-sighted vision focus the light from incoming objects on the retina while people with myopia focus too far forward of this point. In contrast, farsightedness is caused when then the cornea of the eye is flatter than it should be.
Typical myopia symptoms include difficulty in viewing far away objects, which gets worse with distance and blurriness of vision. Some people claim that myopia causes an increased number of eye “floaters” — small impurities in the middle of the eye that can be seen floating around a person’s field of view. There are a number of other factors that can cause this problem too, however. Usually eye “floaters” are more noticeable in bright weather.
There are many theories as to why myopia symptoms start to appear. One of the most popular is that nearsightedness is caused by working at a computer or reading books for too long, although whether this is true has yet to be confirmed scientifically. Other factors that may cause myopia symptoms include genetic disposition and environmental factors such as diet, stress and sleeping too long.
Although symptoms are usually common to all types of myopia, there are a number of different versions. Simple myopia, for example, is the most common and is caused by an eye that is longer than it should be. Degenerative myopia is a condition that over time becomes more apparent and difficult to deal with. Nocturnal myopia causes difficultly in eyesight during low-light conditions.
Myopia symptoms can be categorized by how severe the condition is and how much lens power is required to correct it. The three categories are low, medium and high myopia. Myopia can also be categorized by the age at which the condition starts to appear in the patient. For example, infantile myopia occurs at birth while early adult myopia occurs later in life, between the age of 20 and 40.