Effects of Home Lighting Environment on Axial Growth of Schoolchildren

Light environment significantly affects myopia development. As students in primary and middle schools spend much time at home after school, the quality of home lighting environment is crucial for the visual health of students. However, researchers have seldom reported the effects of home lighting environment on myopia development, especially on axial growth. In this study, we measured the axial lengths of 300 students in Grade Five. Among these students, we used questionnaires to select several typical students for each axial length range, and investigated the photometric features of their home lighting environments. The questionnaire results showed significant correlations between the lamp qualities of home lighting environment and axial lengths. As we noticed that illuminance uniformities of these home lighting environments were quite distinct, we selected three typical environments with different illuminance uniformities, and analyzed the corresponding axial lengths. We also performed human factor experiments in these three home lighting environments. The results implied that illuminance uniformity had impacts on axial growth, and ciliary accommodation and modulation transfer function were sensitive to illuminance uniformity. It seemed that fatigue in ciliary accommodation and modulation transfer function tended to induce longer axial growth.