By By Cara Murez HealthDay Reporter, HealthDay Reporter
(HealthDay)
WEDNESDAY, Oct. 5, 2022 (HealthDay News) — Greater than half of sightless children in the US didn’t must lose their vision, in accordance with a latest study.
The findings suggest the necessity to prioritize addressing preventable vision loss in all children in America, said study co-author Dr. Scott Lambert, a professor of ophthalmology at Stanford University in California.
He recalled the story of a toddler diagnosed with cataracts at 3 weeks old. English was not the parents’ first language. Despite near weekly calls, it took eight months to get a referral for surgery, though the child was insured though Medicaid, Lambert said.
Researchers analyzed the IRIS Registry, which has comprehensive data on eye disease. They found that leading causes of childhood blindness look like retinopathy of prematurity (ROP), nystagmus and cataracts, that are mostly treatable and preventable.
The data was presented this week on the annual meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, in Chicago.
“There are two things which can be actionable here,” Lambert said in an academy news release. “ROP continues to be a significant issue on this country, and it must be addressed at every nursery to make sure these babies are getting proper treatment. Second is that though cataracts are treatable, delays in treatment have caused children to lose vision needlessly.”
Lambert said due to his real-world experience he would suggest that inequities in care may play a component, though the information doesn’t reveal the explanations for treatment delay.
For the study, researchers identified all children ages 18 years and younger whose vision was 20/200 or worse of their better-seeing eye after correction with glasses.
They found that just about 2% of the greater than 81,000 children within the IRIS Registry met these criteria. The team also found that about 31% of blindness was attributable to ROP. Greater than 8% was attributable to nystagmus and nearly 7% stemmed from cataract.
The leading site was the retina, at almost half, then the optic nerve with about 12% and the lens with 10%.
This data led the team to conclude that 52% of youngsters had treatable causes of blindness.
America doesn’t have a big, national database tracking health data, the academy noted, saying that has made causes of blindness in American children not well understood.
Findings presented at medical meetings are considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.
SOURCE: American Academy of Ophthalmology, news release, Oct. 2, 2022
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