Correlation of optical components with ocular refraction among teen-agers in Taipei.

From 2 senior-high and 2 vocational schools in Taipei, 3251 children with age 16-19 were randomly selected to study the relationship between ocular refraction and its main optical components, corneal curvature and axial length. While the corneal curvature was found to play only a minor role in the determination of ocular refraction, the measurements of axial length parallelled the degree of myopia (r = 0.74). A two-years' longitudinal study of additional 411 children from one junior-high school (age 13 through 15) further pointed to the importance of axial length in the production and progression of myopia.