This article was originally published in a sponsored newsletter.

Friends and colleagues often comment on how challenging it is to keep up to date with the myopia control literature, even for those who work in myopia as their full-time profession. I face a similar predicament, even though most of my writing and research is in the same area.

A 2021 review of the myopia control literature¹ reported a gradual increase in the annual number of articles published between 1970 and 2010 (0 and 30 articles, respectively). It also noted that this modest number was followed by a steep increase through to 2020 (127 articles). I conducted a cursory literature search with a similar strategy used by those authors and found that more than 200 articles were published in 2022. That’s almost double the number of articles in just two years! Interestingly, nearly half of the 2022 papers come from China.

The situation reminds me of the idiom “drinking from a firehose,” which can be defined as to be inundated with an uncapped, unfiltered amount. For those of you in practice, keeping up to date with the literature may appear impossible, so you rely on trusted sources (such as this newsletter) to keep current with the field and to assist you in delivering the best possible care to your patients.

As the year begins, we recommit to providing topical, cutting-edge information in our columns, interviews, and published abstracts. Feel free to email me (mark.bullimore@broadcastmed.com) with suggestions or requests for topics to be covered. Likewise, we are always interested in new columnists.

1. Efron N, Morgan PB, Jones LW, Nichols JJ. Topical Review: Bibliometric Analysis of the Emerging Field of Myopia Management. Optom Vis Sci. 2021 Sep 1;98:1039-1044.