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Original article
Prevalence and causes of childhood blindness in Huidong County, South China, primary ascertained by the key informants
  1. Yanping Li1,
  2. Jianhua Yan2,
  3. Zhonghao Wang2,
  4. Wenyong Huang2,
  5. Shengsong Huang2,
  6. Ling Jin2,
  7. Yingfeng Zheng2,
  8. Xuhua Tan2,
  9. Jinglin Yi1,
  10. Jennifer Yip3,
  11. Baixiang Xiao2
  1. 1 Outpatients Department, Affiliated Eye Hospital of Nanchang University, Nanchang, China
  2. 2 State Key Laboratory of Ophthalmology, Zhongshan Ophthalmic Centre, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou City, China
  3. 3 The International Centre for Eye Health, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, London, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dr Baixiang Xiao; xiaobaixiang2006{at}126.com

Abstract

Purpose The aim of this study is to ascertain the prevalence and causes of childhood blindness and severe visual impairment (BL/SVI) in Huidong, South China.

Methods This cross-sectional study was conducted in early 2017 in areas of 139 816 children at the age of 0–15 as the study subjects. We used the trained key informants (KIs) to do preliminary visual test in the communities and refer those children suspected with blindness or unable to count fingers with both eyes at 5 m to hospital for further examination by paediatric ophthalmologist for causes. The WHO’s definition of BL/SVI was used, as blindness is best-corrected visual acuity worse than 0.05 in better eye and SVI is equal to or better than 0.05 but worse than 0.1 in better eye.

Results Three hundred and fourteen KIs were trained. In total, 42 children with BL/SVI were found, and among them over half (22, 52.4%) were due to posterior segment disorders by anatomic site and 18 (42.9%) children were potentially preventable; these included BL/SVI caused by factors at children’s development in intrauterine and after birth. This established the prevalence of BL/SVI was at 0.31/1000 (95% CI 0.28 to 0.34/1000).

Conclusion A low prevalence of childhood blindness was documented in this study. Establishment of surveillance system for disabled children including those with BL/SVI and better health education on eye care to the public according to the surveillance outcomes would help to reduce avoidable children’s BL/SVI further in China.

  • prevalence
  • childhood blindness and severe visual impairment
  • causes
  • key informants

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjophth-2018-000240

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    Footnotes

    • Contributors BX: study design, training of the key informants, monitoring the data collection, data analysis as well as manuscript drafting and revision. YL: draft of the manuscript, data analysis and critical revision of the manuscript. JY, ZW, WH, YZ, SH, XT, JY: design of the study and valuable comments on the manuscript. LJ: statistics analysis and helpful revision. JY: designing and revision of the manuscript.

    • Funding This study is funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project No. 81530028; 81721003) and the Guangdong Province Science & Technology Plan (Project No. 2014B020228002).

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent Not required.

    • Ethics approval Ethics approval was obtained from Zhongshan Ophthalmic Centre, Sun Yat-sen University. The approval reference number is 2017KYPJ086. All the children examined at county hospital gave written consent in the presence of their caregivers.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

    • Data sharing statement Datasets used and/or analysed in this study are available from the corresponding author on request.