Authors : Priti Singh, Rahul Agarwal
DOI : 10.18231/2348-7682.2018.0008
Volume : 8
Issue : 1
Year : 0
Page No : 34-39
Elderly population in India is rapidly on an increase due to increased life expectancy. Visual status is one of the most important health quality indicators for the elderly who are highly prone to develop various eye diseases which form a major health problem to them. So we have tried to study the pattern of ocular morbidity in this age group, to understand the risk factors responsible for blindness in the elderly so that we can focus on the preventive measures that we can adopt to avoid this. In our hospital bassed cross sectional study 500 patients above 50 years of age were taken. Detailed history based on pre-prepaired questionare was taken followed by complete ocular examination and relevant investigations to diagnose the ocular disease in these elderly people. We found that refractive errors followed by cataract were found to be the most common ocular problems in our sample population. Various risk factors like age, gender, residence, educational status, socio-economic status, hypertension, diabetes, cooking fuel used, smoking, alcoholism, and tobacco consumption were tabulated and there significance in causing ocular morbidity and blindness was studied. Finally we concluded that there is a high incidence of ocular morbidity in old age individuals most of the causes being either treatable or preventable. Therefore the focus should be on providing affordable quality eye care services at both the urban and rural areas so that we can prevent ocular morbity and blindness in these elderly individuals specially those with low educational and socioeconomic status.
Keywords: Cataract, Glaucoma, Dry eye, Retinopathy, Refractive errors.