Blindness and vision impairment in a rural south Indian population: the Aravind Comprehensive Eye Survey☆
Section snippets
Methods
The ACES was a population-based prevalence survey of ocular disease and visual impairment conducted in a sample of rural villages of southern Tamil Nadu, India. The specific aims of this project were to estimate the prevalence of major ocular disorders among adults 40 years of age or older and to estimate the prevalence and causes of vision loss among persons of all ages.
The sampling frame for this study consisted of a sample of typical rural districts (equivalent to counties in the United
Results
A total of 4702 households were enumerated from 14 rural blocks in which there were 17,200 subjects aged 6 years or older (Fig 1). Subjects younger than 6 years of age did not have visual acuity measured at the village level. Out of 17,200 subjects aged 6 years or older, 11,661 (67.8%) were between 6 and 39 years of age, and 5539 (32.2%) were 40 years of age or older.
Among those younger than 40 years of age, 11,583 (99.3%) received village-based screening examinations, and 78 persons (0.7%)
Discussion
Door-to-door enumeration and high participation rates among those enumerated coupled with the random nature of the sample support the generalizability of results from this study to the population of these three districts. The exclusion of villages with <350 inhabitants may have altered the representativeness of the study population, although it is unclear whether such villages might have had similar, lower, or higher rates of blindness and visual impairment. Such villages are not more or less
Acknowledgements
This study was supported in part by unrestricted grants from Allergan, Inc.; Alcon Laboratories, Inc.; and the Zeiss Corporation.
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Manuscript no. 220219.