Original articlePrevalence and Risk Factors for Visual Impairment in Preschool Children: The Sydney Paediatric Eye Disease Study
Section snippets
Participants
The Sydney Paediatric Eye Disease Study (SPEDS) identified 3333 eligible children, aged between 6 and 72 months, from a door-to-door census using the 2006 Australian Bureau of Statistics data in 4 selected postcodes in metropolitan Sydney, Australia. The postcodes were selected using random cluster sampling, stratified by socioeconomic status, to represent each of the 3 major strata in Sydney (inner city, suburban, and outer suburban). The recruitment process involved leaving information
Visual Impairment
Visual impairment was defined as the best presenting VA <20/50 (Snellen equivalent 6/15, logMAR score 0.4) in children aged <48 months and <20/40 (Snellen equivalent 6/12, logMAR score 0.3) in children aged ≥48 months.12 The better eye was defined as the eye with better VA, and the worse eye was defined as the eye with the worse VA. Thus, all children with VI in their better eye (n = 32) had VI present in both eyes.
Refractive Errors
Myopia was defined as SE (sphere + ½ cylinder) ≤−0.50 diopters (D), hyperopia
Results
After excluding children with incomplete VA data, 1188 children were included in this report. The mean age was 52.0 months, with similar proportions of girls (48.7%) and boys (51.3%). Caucasian was the dominant ethnicity (47.1%), followed by East Asian (21.4%), South Asian (13.5%), other ethnicities/mixed ethnicity (9.8%), and Middle Eastern (8.2%). Approximately half of the tested children had at least 1 parent with a university degree (51.8%), 83.1% of children had at least 1 parent working
Discussion
By using essentially identical definitions, the MEPEDS12 reported a worse eye presenting VI prevalence of 5.9% in African-American and 7.1% in Hispanic preschool children, and a better eye VI prevalence of 2.8% in African-American and 2.5% in Hispanic children. The BPEDS reported similar VI prevalence in 1 or both eyes in 3.5% of white children and in 4.4% of black children.11 Our results are in keeping with the findings from these 2 studies. However, the Beijing Study of Visual Impairment in
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Manuscript no. 2010-994.
Financial Disclosure(s): The author(s) have no proprietary or commercial interest in any materials discussed in this article.
The SPEDS was supported by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council Grant 402425, and the Westmead Millennium Institute, University of Sydney.