Gareth Lingham - research works

Having a current pterygium or previous pterygium excision is associated with a diagnosis of keratinocyte skin cancer.

While causality cannot be determined, the association may reflect shared risk factors such as chronic ultraviolet radiation exposure, and people with a pterygium should be advised that they are at higher risk of skin cancer.

In adulthood, higher time spent outdoors was associated with lower prevalence of self-reported myopia. This may indicate that outdoor behaviours in adulthood reflect those in childhood, when myopia develops.

However, caution interpreting these findings is warranted due to the cross-sectional design, potential misclassification of myopia and temporal gap (13-17 years) between self-reporting of outdoor time and myopia status.

The prevalence of self-reported myopia in Australian adults appears high and likely an overestimation.

As commonly observed, self-reported myopia was higher in educated urban populations, with a greater propensity in females than males in the younger cohorts.

Poorer quality of life and health ratings in self-reported myopes align with previous findings. The higher rates of health conditions in self-reported myopes may reflect shared lifestyle and environmental risk factors.

In this cross-sectional analysis, ocular dominance was associated with small but systematic interocular asymmetry in SER and AL across childhood and early adulthood, which exceeds laterality effects.

Dominance-related asymmetry was attenuated in myopia and amplified in anisometropia. Ocular dominance should be considered when analysing interocular refractive and biometric data in research and clinical contexts.