Dr. Daniel Joyce from University of Nevada, Reno awarded $69,547 Knights Templar Eye Foundation Grant for Juvenile Myopia Research

Dr. Daniel Joyce from the University of Nevada, Reno was awarded a grant for $69,547 for research entitled: Circadian light-sensing dysfunction in juvenile myopia

Myopia is an elongation of the eyeball where light focuses in front of the eye’s retina rather than on the retina itself. It results in blurring of far objects in the visual scene and it is the most common visual disability in school-aged children. Half of these children will experience worsening symptoms into adulthood and can progress to blindness, glaucoma, retinal detachment or cataracts.

The incidence of myopia has ballooned in recent years with converging evidence suggesting that light-sensing for so-called non-image function (NIF; e.g. setting physiological states in the brain) becomes dysfunctional to cause juvenile myopia and this is further compounded by our modern lifestyle where we spend our lives indoors under artificial lights, view light at night, and don’t wake up or go to bed with dawn/dusk.

Dr Joyce’s training in vision science and circadian rhythms to identify, for the first time, which specific parts of the NIF light-sensing circuitry are dysfunctional. Dr. Joyce can measure the propagation of this dysfunction through important biological pathways, and how this dysfunction results in damaged real-world behaviors such as sleep/wake rhythms to further exacerbate juvenile myopia.

Understanding this causal sequence is critical to developing treatments that address the cause(s) of juvenile myopia, not just the symptoms as current treatments do. This is extremely important because myopia is estimated to affect 30% of the world’s population already (the cost in the US alone being $4 billion a year) and will affect 50% of the world’s population by 2050.