Blue light emitted from computers and phones has become a concern partly because of suppressing melatonin secretion at night, but also in part because it supposedly (I don't know how good the evidence is for this) has negative effects on the eye itself. Given all this, I was surprised to read recently that apparently there is some evidence blue light inhibits myopia progression.

https://search.proquest.com/openview/2b430d393996982a099bb1bdc812da2f/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y

Blue light has been shown to have an inhibitory effect on both myopia induction and

progression in both studies involving animal models, as well as human subjects. Specifically,

blue light is reported to inhibit axial length elongation and increase choroidal thickness. (Lin et

al., 2020a; Lou & Ostrin, 2020; Moon et al., 2017; Rucker et al., 2015; Thakur et al., 2021). The

most acceptable hypothesis to explain this effect of blue light on eye growth is based on

Longitudinal Chromatic Aberration (LCA) (Lin et al., 2020a; Rucker & Wallman, 2009).

Specifically, this hypothesis posits that the inhibitory effect of blue light on eye elongation is a

consequence of blue light being refracted more than red light and so focused in front of the retina

of an emmetropic eye, while red light is focused behind the retina. This model also rests on the

assumption that the relative intensities of the red and blue components of retinal images are

encoded in some way.

I'm wondering, why is this not mentioned ever in popular messaging on this topic? I know many people have taken to using blue light filters even during the daytime, because of the claims that it's not good for eye health, isn't that just increasing myopia risk, if the quoted passage is true? Or is evidence for this inhibition of myopia just not very strong?

11 minutes ago, Stephen001 said:

I'm wondering, why is this not mentioned ever in popular messaging on this topic? I know many people have taken to using blue light filters even during the daytime, because of the claims that it's not good for eye health, isn't that just increasing myopia risk, if the quoted passage is true? Or is evidence for this inhibition of myopia just not very strong?

I haven't read the mentioned papers so cannot comment on that, but I have been looking at the lit regarding blue light and to me it looks like that (again) popular messaging has taken a tidbit and overhyped it by a massive amount. There were initial studies showing that blue light had negative effects on eyestrain, focus and sleep. However, the effect size was fairly small.

Since then follow-up using more sensitive methods (including EEG) have largely failed to replicate that effect at scale. Moreover, metastudies looking at e.g. use of blue-light filtering lenses basically found no impact eye strain measures. In other words, the link between blue light and eye health is not very strong based on current knowledge.