Over recent years, it has become clear that some of the larger defects in vision – such as myopia (nearsightedness) and astigmatism (an imperfection in the eye’s curvature) – have a strong genetic component.
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[R]esearchers from Anglia Ruskin University’s Vision and Eye Research Unit, in the United Kingdom…set out to investigate how much of these higher order aberrations, or optical defects, are due to genetics alone.…
They found that identical twins, with identical DNA, also had identical defects – even in individuals over the age of 50. This was a surprising finding as these people had been “using” their eyes for half a century, leaving them open for environmental factors – including diet, accidents, and disease – to make subtle changes.
In the nonidentical twins, who share an average of 50 percent of their genes, the ocular defects were different. This demonstrates that genetics play a much more substantial role than the environment when it comes to small changes in vision.
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The results fly in the face of older theories, many of which presumed that environmental factors were mostly involved in optical aberrations.
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