Strabismus surgery rates in decline

The number of strabismus surgery procedures carried out in England has fallen significantly over the past five decades.

A study published in this month's British Journal of Ophthalmology looked at strabismus surgery rates in children up to the age of 15 from 1963 to 2010 (some 519,089 children) and found the rate had dropped from 189 per 100,000 in 1968 to 64 per 100,000 in 2010, a threefold decrease.

The major drop was between the 1970s and the 1990s. There was also a significant variation between different regions of England.

The borough with the highest rate of admissions was Easington in County Durham, at 138.6/100,000 of the child population, compared with 28.2 for the borough of Kensington and Chelsea in London. The local authorities with higher rates of surgery were marginally more likely to be in areas of relatively high deprivation, but this only accounted for a fraction of the variance (5.3 per cent).