Prevalence of Refractive Errors and Colour Blindness in School Going Children of Wardha Tehsil: A Prospective Study

Abstract

Introduction: Subnormal vision in childhood affects performance in school or day to day activity and has a poor effect on the future life of a child. Refractive errors are one of the most common reasons and is the most easily correctable cause of vision loss as the spectacles are inexpensive, non-invasive, and useful. Aim: To determine the Prevalence of Refractive error and Colour Blindness in school going children of Wardha District. Materials and Methods: A Prospective cross-sectional study was conducted in 6 co-educational randomly selected schools of Wardha. History taking, torchlight examination was performed followed by recording of visual aquity by Snellen’s chart and colour vision by Ishihara 38 plate edition. Children with visual acquity less than 6/9 were dilated using 2% homatropine eye drops, complete mydriasis was achieved following which retinoscopy was done. The Statistical analysis was performed by using “descriptive and inferential statistics” using “chi-square test” and software used in the analysis were “SPSS 24.0 version” and “GraphPad Prism 7.0 version” and the p-value of <0.05 was considered as significant. Results: Children in the study group were in the range of twelve to fifteen years. About 55.49 percent of the children were males in the study group, 88.67% belonged to upper high socioeconomic status. Only 18.61% of children had a refractive error. Prevalence of myopia was 59.01% followed by astigmatism (26.71%), and hypermetropia (14.29%). The number of cases of refractive errors increased with advancing age. There was no significant association between gender and refractive error. About 60.87% of the children with refractive errors complained of blurring of vision and 28.57% complained of headache. A total of 85.75% of the children with refractive errors in present study were not wearing spectacles. It was observed that 1.62% had colour blindness. Among protans, 1.045% were male, and 0.35% were females. Among deutans 0.23% were male children. Conclusion: Inspite of refractive error being reversible cause of blindness, we see that uncorrected refractive error is still rampant, even in areas with families of good socio-economic status. This is alarming and it highlights the need to strengthen the existing screening programs.

Keywords

• astigmatism
• deutanopia
• hypermetropia
• myopia
• protanopia
• uncorrected refractive error