Visual impairment on rise among children

The study emphasised that increased ethnic diversity and better survival rates of low birth-weight babies had contributed towards the rise in numbers, which was putting extra strain on healthcare resources. It also highlighted how childhood visual impairment was associated with lower socio-economic status.
Clinical lecturer in ophthalmic epidemiology Jugnoo Rahi and colleagues from London's Institute of Child Health identified 439 newly diagnosed visually impaired or blind children in the UK during 2000.
More than three-quarters of these children had other diseases or disabilities in addition to visual impairment, and visual impairment/blindness was greatest in the first year of life (frequency rate four per 10,000 population), with a cumulative frequency of six per 10,000 by the age of 16.
Pre-natal causes accounted for around 60 per cent of childhood visual impairment/blindness, and around three-quarters of the newly diagnosed children had visual impairment that could not have been prevented or treated with current scientific knowledge.
The study also found that there was a 'complex array of underlying causes', influenced by the increased survival of low-birthweight babies and the susceptibility of children from ethnic minorities to certain ocular conditions.
Rahi said: 'Severe visual impairment and blindness in childhood in the UK is more common, occurs more frequency in the context of complex non-ophthalmic impairments, and has greater associated mortality, than previously assumed.'
He said that the study's findings indicated that visual impairment and blindness in children in industrialised countries 'should be viewed within the broader contact of disability and chronic disease in childhood'.
'New interventions are necessary to address the largely insurmountable burden of blinding eye disease in the industrialised world,' he said, 'and their development will require integration of ongoing clinical, epidemiological and basic scientific research.
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