I have wondered why the eye stays elongated. My quest for answers has been from dubious sources on the internet and so everything said below is suspect. It is all based on reasoning and thoughts from potentially bad information.
I read that the eyeball is a sack filled with a viscous fluid, and therefore, its shape is determined by the eye muscles. I determined the viscosity of the eye fluid is thicker than water, but less than motor oil. The idea behind the eye muscles is that near work puts tension on the muscles and they stiffen up and thus elongate the eyeball. So now I wonder why the eye muscles don't relax. Surely, a good night’s sleep or two would do the trick. Could the eye muscles return to their proper position by not wearing my glasses and spending more time focusing on distant objects? After about 3 years of experimenting with this thought, my vision has not improved. But I work indoors in front a computer everyday with glasses on. I have read the eyes muscles lack any counter force to pull the eyeball back into shape. Perhaps the eyeball shell has grown deformed and it is stiff enough to hold the shape. Maybe the eye socket determines the shape. Maybe the eye muscles have nothing to do with the shape. I would like to think that there is some corrective measure built into the eye system. Otherwise, it would seem everybody's eyes are on a one-way trip to becoming myopic and only the speed of this transition can be affected. I know that for me, I wore my glasses all the time, even when I was reading. Looking back, when I was first diagnosed, I really only needed them to play baseball at night under the lights. I sort of wished that was the only time I wore them. I wonder if my eyes could have corrected themselves. Now it seems too late, because I need to wear them just to read a computer screen 18" away. I have also read that wearing glasses forces your eyes to focus at a close up distance. So wearing glasses is like doing near work all the time and thus puts you on the fast track to becoming more myopic. After all this rambling, I guess the real question is what is keeping the eyeball in the wrong shape? If this were known, then maybe one could figure out how to fix the condition. As a final note, I have also read that maybe the eye ball is not elongated, but that the cornea is not shaped correctly.
I have thought about this myself, but I thought that elongation being permanent or difficult to reverse was intuitive. If you stretch a piece of a plastic it stays that way.
I believe the prevailing theory is when you focus near, your lenses expand pushing on the aqueous humor, causing expansion of the eyeball. When you focus far, they shrink, but these lenses don't pull the eyeball back in because they aren't connected to the front or back of the eyeball. This is why people with myopia often have increased intraocular pressure. I don't understand how this fits in with the findings in this article though.
I have never heard of anyone becoming less nearsighted. And even presbyopia is simply when your lens cannot change anymore, it doesn't actually shrink your eyeballs.
It seems like the optical industry is content with making a lot of money constantly prescribing stronger glasses every year or lasik which has significant risks and doesn't stop the elongation.
Whoever cracks this problem will make a lot of money. But shrinking eyeballs is probably a very difficult task and easier and very profitable to just fix the symptoms. And most people don't become blind from this so it doesn't seem like a priority.
> I have thought about this myself, but I thought that elongation being permanent or difficult to reverse was intuitive. If you stretch a piece of a plastic it stays that way.
May be different for living tissue. I wonder if there might be some brace developed to reshape the eye ball, that could be eventually removed. Of course the implant procedure might be incredibly, prohibitively invasive.
