Causes of Childhood Blindness in the United States using the IRIS® Registry (Intelligent Research in Sight).

PURPOSE To investigate causes of childhood blindness in the United States using the IRIS® Registry (Intelligent Research in Sight). DESIGN Cross-Sectional Study. PARTICIPANTS Patients ≤18 years of age with visual acuity 20/200 or worse in their better seeing eye in the IRIS Registry during 2018. METHODS Causes of blindness were classified by anatomical site and specific diagnoses. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Percentages of causes of blindness. RESULTS Of 81,164 children with 2018 visual acuity data in the IRIS Registry, 961 (1.18%) had visual acuity 20/200 or worse in their better-seeing eye. Leading causes of blindness were retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) in 301 (31.3%), nystagmus in 78 (8.1%), and cataract in 64 (6.7%) patients. The retina was the leading anatomic site (47.7%) followed by optic nerve (11.6%) and lens (10.0%). A total of 52.4% of patients had treatable causes of blindness. CONCLUSIONS This analysis offers a unique cross-sectional view of childhood blindness in the US using a clinical data registry. More than one-half of blind patients had a treatable cause of blindness.

• Publication year

  2023

• Venue

  Ophthalmology (Rochester, Minn.)

• Publication date

  2023-04-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.ophtha.2023.04.004PMID 37037315PMCID PMC10524509
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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