Effect of presbyopic correction on vision related quality of life among Nigerian public secondary school teachers.

Abstract

Background: Presbyopia which blurs near sight in the aging populace worldwide, can be much more bothersome among school teachers who typically read and write both at work and at home to prepare lessons and grade pupils’ papers. The
aim of this study was to determine the effect of presbyopic correction on vision-related quality of life (VRQOL) among public secondary school teachers in Lokoja, Nigeria.

Methods: This was a quasi-experimental study and 329 public secondary school teachers aged 35 years and above were recruited. All teachers had both distance and near visual acuity (VA) assessments, those with VA worse than 6/18 had
refraction done. Teachers with uncorrected presbyopia and those with inappropriate spectacles received near correction and their VRQOL was reassessed two months after. Statistical analysis was performed using IBM-SPSS version 22.Paired T-test was used to determine any differences in between the VRQOL scores before and after treatment of presbyopia.

Results: The mean age of the selected teachers was 45.9±6.49years with a female to male ratio of 3.2:1. The prevalence of presbyopia was 71.1%. (Table 1) Only 47.4% of the teachers had an appropriate presbyopic correction. As shown in
table 2, the VRQOL scores of presbyopic participants before and after correction showed significant differences in the means across the age groups (p<0.001).

Discussion: The prevalence of presbyopia in this study was 71.1%. This is lower compared to 79.1% reported by Anajekwu1 in Onitsha and 81.3% in a study in Ifo by Idowu et al2 but higher than the prevalence of 55.1%, 68.1%, and 66.4% reported by Koduah et al3, Kumah et al4 both in Ghana and Ehrlich et al5 in Jakarta, Indonesia. The differences in the prevalence might be due to variability in the definitions of presbyopia as the criterion for the reading distance in this study was 40cm. This study also found a significant association between corrected near vision and improved vision-related quality of life among the study participants. This is in keeping with the results of previous studies done in Nigeria which found an association between uncorrected presbyopia and decreased vision-related quality of life.6

Conclusion: Presbyopic correction improved the vision related quality of life. The fact that more than half (52.5%) in this cohort of teachers either had no reading glasses at all or had inappropriate corrections underscores the acute need to improve on optometric care in under-served settings such as Nigeria.