Many elderly people in Britain have impaired vision that could be prevented if the National Health Service delivered better primary eye care, researchers said on Thursday.
In the first study to investigate the vision of a large sample of the UK’s elderly, the investigators found that 12.4% of people over 75 years had poor eyesight–more than in other European countries, the USA or Australia. Mr. Richard P. L. Wormald, from Moorfields Eye Hospital, London, and colleagues gathered visual acuity data from 14,600 people who were treated at 53 family medicine clinics.
They found that overall 1803 people had binocular visual impairment at less than 6/18 Snellen acuity–even when they were wearing their glasses. Women were most likely to suffer reduced vision and the risk of impaired eyesight increased steeply with age, the investigators report in the British Journal of Ophthalmology for July. Among people aged over 90, nearly 7% were clinically blind, and 36.9% had poor visual acuity.
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