Components of patients’ symptoms
| Components of symptoms | Definition of outcome | Descriptive terms used by focus group participants |
| Uncomfortable or painful eye | A person complains of eye pain that may be severe and seem sharp, aching or throbbing, or a person may feel only mild irritation of the eye surface or the sensation of a foreign object in the eye (foreign body sensation). | Feeling irritation; scraping sensation or sandpaper when closing eyes, or experience of sharp pain; stabbing pain, terrible pain. |
| Watery eye | A person experiences a watery or a runny eye (excess tears). | Feeling your eyes streaming; like you have been crying. |
| Redness | A person experiences a visible bloodshot or redness to the white part of the eye. | Experience of having red eyes, a layer of blood go across the eye, and then as that goes down to my eyes it’s almost like it’s bloodshot. |
| Photosensitivity | A person experiences light intolerance or the eye is oversensitive to light (eg, in sunlight, fluorescent light, headlights, street lights). | Feeling light sensitive as just can’t stand any light at all; sensitive eyes to sunlight, fluorescent light, headlights, yellow bright light in the street. |
| Floater | A person complains of seeing moving dark or grey spots, specks, strands or cobwebs. | Seeing floating things; blob; seeing like a fly in front of vision; and black circles or dots going round. I had floaters and the only way to explain it is like a cling film over my eye that’s creased. |
| Visual disturbance | A person complains of seeing blurred, hazy, foggy, grainy vision, flashing/shimmering lights or double vision. | Seeing fog in front of vision; hazy vision; flashing lights; shimmering lights; a drifting across my eyes; grainy vision; loads of steam. Seeing things but not defined, but it’s just like a milky haze. |
| Distortion of vision | A person complains that straight lines may appear bent, crooked or wavy. | Seeing things wavy rather than straight and lines appear bent. |
| Headache | A person experiences a severe or throbbing headache. | Feeling headache I can’t spend more than an hour on the computer, because it just gives me bad headache; it is like throbbing. |
| Fatigue | A person experiences fatigue, exhaustion, feeling tired or lack of energy. | Feeling tired; very exhausted; I feel I am a sleepy person. |