Epidemiological study of patients availing free cataract services of national programme of control of blindness

Abstract

Purpose: To find the proportion of patients who are blind or have low vision prior to undergoing free cataract surgery at a tertiary referral center, selected from free eye camps. To evaluate which patient groups are more in need of free cataract surgery, a series of consecutive cases of cataract that attended free eye camps and were operated during three years, 2008-2010, were evaluated. Materials and Methods: Using computerized assessment systems, we congregated data on pre-operative visual status, diagnosis, condition of other eye, age, gender, caste, and locality for 2507 patients. Visual status was defined as per World Health Organisation (WHO) classification. Results: A total of 2507 (15.06%) operations were performed out of 16,637 cases who attended eye camps, 63.3% were blind (V.A.<3/60) patients, 19.2% were with low vision (V.A. <6/60). Five hundred and seventy-eight (23.1%) patients were between 60-64 years of age followed by 491 (19.6%) in 70-74 years of age, and 456 (18.2%) in 65-69 years of age group. About 74.9% operations were performed on patients above 60 years of age. Females outnumbered males in ratio 1.3: 1.0 and operated cases of backward caste were 86.59% in comparison to general population (13.4%). Conclusion: The demand for free surgery amongst blind patients is still high for underprivileged urban as well as rural population. Backward caste, females, and citizens of age groups 71-80 and 81-90 are most in need of services of cataract programs because of lack of awareness and affordability.