This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
Ten-item addition tailors Visual Function Questionnaire for neuro-ophthalmic disorders
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
A supplementary questionnaire to the 25-question National Eye Institute Visual Function Questionnaire may better capture visual problems reported by patients with neuro-ophthalmologic disorders, a study found.
Laura J. Balcer, MD, MSCE, and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine developed and tested the 10-question neuro-ophthalmic supplement in a study including 215 patients with neuro-ophthalmologic disorders, including optic neuritis, multiple sclerosis, idiopathic intracranial hypertension, ischemic optic neuropathy, stroke, ocular myasthenia gravis, ocular motor palsies and thyroid eye disease. They compared questionnaire responses in these patients to those in a control group of normal subjects.
The researchers found that the supplement significantly improved the ability to differentiate patients with neuro-ophthalmic disorders from the control group (P < .001) independent of the score on the original NEI survey. The difference remained significant after adjusting for age and sex (P = .001), demonstrating the supplement's validity, according to the study authors.
"The use of the 10-item supplement in clinical trials and epidemiologic studies will examine its capacity to demonstrate treatment effects in longitudinal cohorts," they said.
The study is published in the December issue of the American Journal of Ophthalmology.