Screen flicker, PWM dimming and digital eye strain: an annotated bibliography and evidence table (2026)

An annotated bibliography and evidence table of 29 PubMed-indexed studies on digital eye strain, flicker from lighting and laboratory stimuli, pulse-width modulation (PWM) dimming of displays, evening screen light and the body clock, brightness and contrast, and individual sensitivity to light and flicker in migraine. Each row says what the study measured, in whom, what its abstract supports and what it does not show, and every supported statement is tied to a verbatim sentence from the PubMed abstract. All abstracts were read on 27 September 2026. The reading mostly maps a gap. In these studies, eye strain symptoms were linked to incomplete blinking, breaks and glare, and the blue-light lenses that were tested showed no clear short-term benefit for eye strain. The evidence that flicker people cannot see causes eye strain is thin, and most of it comes from lighting and laboratory stimuli rather than screens. We found no study in PubMed that measured eye strain symptoms against the flicker of an ordinary computer screen under masked conditions, and the one PWM display study we found reports whether a stroboscopic effect was visible on a smartphone display, not any symptom. Files: evidence-table.csv (one row per study), claims-to-abstracts.csv (each summarised statement with its PMID and the abstract sentence behind it), references.txt (the full citation list) and README.txt (how the studies were found and read, and where the evidence is thin). This is a structured reading of abstracts, not a systematic review, and it is not medical advice. The abstract excerpts are short quotations included so each statement can be checked; they remain under their publishers' copyright, and the CC BY 4.0 licence covers the compilation and our own text. Sundown, a Mac display app, maintains this record and a web version of the same reading at https://trysundown.com/research/screen-flicker-and-eye-strain