Table 1. Summary of studies investigating foveal spatial vision and sensitivity tasks in myopia.
| Author | Refractive error range of myopic cohort [D] |
Functional tests | Results for myopes at foveal center |
Suggested cause |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fiorentini and Maffei, 1976 | −5.5 to −10 (n = 10) | CSF | Reduced CSF | Neural insensitivity (myopic amblyopia) |
| Thorn et al., 1986 | −6 to −9.75 (n = 13) | CSF | No difference in CSF | Global expansion |
| Collins and Carney, 1990 | −2 to −11 (n = 16) |
VA, CSF | No difference in VA or CSF between low and high myopic groups with contact lens correction | NA |
| Strang et al., 1998 | 0 to −14 (n = 34) | VA | Reduced VA (MAR) with increasing myopia after controlling for spectacle magnification |
Retinal expansion specifically at the posterior pole; increased aberrations |
| Liou and Chiu, 2001 | 0 to >-12 (n = 105 eyes) |
CSF | Reduced CSF with increasing myopia | Retinal stretching and disruption, neural insensitivity (myopic amblyopia) |
| Chui et al., 2005 | −0.5 to −14 (n = 60) | Grating resolution | Decreased resolution acuity in cyc/mm | Retinal expansion specifically at the posterior pole; global expansion along with ganglion cell loss |
| Coletta and Watson, 2006 | +2 to −15 (n = 17) | Interferometric grating resolution | Decreased resolution acuity in cyc/mm but not in cyc/deg | Retinal expansion specifically at the posterior pole |
| Atchison et al., 2006 | +0.75 to −12.4 (n = 121) | Spatial summation; interferometric grating resolution | Increased critical summation area in linear area, but not in angular area; Decreased resolution acuity in cyc/mm but not in cyc/deg |
Retinal expansion specifically at the posterior pole; global expansion along with ganglion cell loss |
| Stoimenova, 2007 | −1 to −8 (n = 60) | Contrast thresholds of 20/120 letters | Lower sensitivity to contrast for letters with a fixed angular size | Morphologic changes in the retina |
| Rossi et al., 2007 | −0.5 to −3.75 (n = 10) | AO-corrected VA | Reduced acuity (MAR) compared to emmetropes | Retinal expansion, neural insensitivity; neural insensitivity (myopic amblyopia) |
| Jaworski et al., 2006 | −8.5 to −11.5 (n = 10) | Foveal summation thresholds; CSF | Increased critical summation area (angular) Decreased luminance sensitivity Reduced contrast sensitivity at high frequencies (cyc/deg) |
Reduction in photoreceptor sensitivity; postreceptoral changes; increased aberrations |
| Ehsaei et al., 2013 | −2.00 to −9.62 (n = 60) | Size threshold of high and low contrast letter targets | No difference in threshold retinal image size between myopes and emmetropes. |
NA |