By RINTARO SAKURAI/ Staff Writer
June 4, 2024 at 08:00 JST
Kyoto University Hospital in Kyoto’s Sakyo Ward (Rintaro Sakurai)
About one of every 50 Japanese people suffers from strabismus, a condition that causes patients’ right and left eyes to become misaligned, a research team from Kyoto University found.
In reportedly the first nationwide study on strabismus, the researchers discovered that children and the elderly are particularly affected.
“Strabismus has turned out to be a common disorder among Japanese people,” said Manabu Miyata, an ophthalmologic lecturer at Kyoto University, who is part of the team.
Strabismus occurs when one eye is looking at an object, but the other eye does not properly align.
The patient becomes cross-eyed, which impairs depth perception and can result in seeing two overlapping images at once, interfering with daily life.
The research team collected this information from the government’s database of medical insurance bill statements from nearly all citizens nationwide.
The researchers counted living patients identified with any of 80 diseases classified as “strabismus” between April 2009 and September 2020.
The results revealed that 2.71 million people, or 2.2 percent of Japan’s total population, had some form of strabismus.
By five-year age group, children aged 10 to 14 were the most impacted at 7.7 percent. Strabismus was found more frequently overall in patients 24 years old or younger.
Meanwhile, the prevalence for people in their 30s to 50s proved to be less than half the overall average. This is likely because their conditions were detected in school health checkups or elsewhere, and the patients had corrective surgery.
Strabismus cases rose dramatically again among people in their 60s. Prevalence in individuals older than 75 exceed the all-generation average. The percentage rose to 2.8 percent in the 80-84 age group.
The trend may be attributed to age-associated loosening of the tissue that supports the eyeballs.
“It (strabismus) occasionally comes with eye fatigue or headaches, although why this happens remains unclear at present,” said Miyata. “We will proceed with genome analysis from here on out to pinpoint the cause and hopefully develop new treatment methods.”
The team’s findings have been published in the U.S. specialized magazine American Journal of Ophthalmology.
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