Peculiarities and risks of myopia in children attending comprehensive schools with different educational programs

The contemporary educational process involves growing diversity and complexity of educational programs and intensity of educational loads. All this, in its turn, affects schoolchildren’s health. Diseases of the eye and adnexa occupy the leading place among pathologies that are caused by unfavorable educational conditions. Prevalence of such diseases grows steadily over the whole period of getting secondary education. The aim of this study was to examine peculiarities and assess risks of myopia in children attending comprehensive schools with different educational programs. Overall, we examined 804 children from the 1st to 11th grade. The test group was made of 312 children who attended comprehensive schools with profound studies of some subjects. The reference group included 492 children who attended ordinary comprehensive schools. Both groups were identical as regards sex and age (р = 0.203-0.479). The study involved handing out questionnaires; estimating whether the organization of the educational processes conformed to the sanitary legislation of the Russian Federation. The research data were analyzed by conventional statistical methods, ROC-analysis, and logistic modeling. We established several leading risk factors that caused myopia in students of comprehensive schools with profound studies of some subjects. They included 5.4-19.2 % higher educational loads; 1.4 times longer periods of PC use during classes; 1.5 times longer periods of work with digital technologies. The children from the test group tended to have myopia, including moderate and high one, 1.3-2.4 times more frequently; the disease occurred at a younger age; risks of the disease were typically higher in such schools (OR = 1.48-2.5). Causation of myopia by factors related to the educational process and digital initiation equaled R2 = 0.52-0.77. Use of ROC-curves identified cut-off points that showed how long it took myopia to develop under the specific educational conditions in comprehensive schools with profound studies of some subjects (the 5th grade) and in ordinary comprehensive schools (the 7th grade). ROC-analysis data indicate it is necessary to apply a differentiated approach to organizing preventive activities for children who attend comprehensive schools with different educational programs.