Adjustable glasses improve education in rural China

Poor vision and a lack of quality education are intrinsically linked. In less developed and remote parts of the world, where access to healthcare professionals is limited, children not wearing the glasses they need are at a higher risk of falling behind in their education due to poor vision.

But research led in China by professor Nathan Congdon, from Queen’s University Belfast, is tackling this problem with an innovative solution. “We already know from previous trials that correcting myopia among school-going children is significantly associated with improved academic importance,” explains professor Congdon, who is also the Director of Research at Orbis International and a visiting professor at Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center in Guangzhou, China. “We also know that even though Chinese children have among the highest rates of short-sightedness in the world, only 15-20% of children needing glasses in rural areas actually have them. We wanted to focus on how we can improve opportunities for children with limited access to good quality vision services and accurate glasses.”

The research, carried out in one of the poorer rural areas of Guangdong, provided short-sighted children aged 11 to 16 years old with either standard prescribed glasses or adjustable glasses, allowing them to perform ‘self-refraction’ to optimise their own vision. Researchers found that children saw better with the adjustable glasses, and reached for them two or three times more frequently than children needing them in poor rural parts of China.

Professor Congdon concludes: “We see adjustable glasses as a way to increase the range and impact of vision professionals. Optometrists would only need to examine the 10% of children with poor vision that could not be adequately improved with self-refraction, greatly increasing access to scarce eye health resources in underserved rural settings.”