Pandemic may have affected consumer product-related eye injuries in older patients
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Key takeaways:
- Emergency department visits decreased in patients aged 65 years and older after the start of the pandemic.
- Contusions and abrasions were the most common ocular injuries.
NEW ORLEANS — The COVID-19 pandemic may have affected consumer product-related ocular injuries among the older population, according to a poster presented at the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology meeting.
An analysis of emergency department (ED) data related to ocular injuries in 58,746 patients aged 65 years and older showed an increase in the percentage of cases treated and admitted/hospitalized from 4.2% before the pandemic to 5.1% during COVID-19 (P < .01).
“If you go through this and start to get an idea of what changed over COVID, you can better target people,” Haider Zaki told Healio/OSN. “Some of the changes that came with COVID are permanent. It’s not something that will just fade out — the way health care goes, the way you get groceries, a lot of that will change, especially in geriatric populations.”
Zaki and colleagues conducted a retrospective study of data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System. The pre-COVID-19 period was defined as 2018 and 2019 and the COVID-19 period as 2020 and 2021. Sex, race, type of ocular injury, environmental location where the injury took place, consumer product category and disposition were reviewed.
There was a 5.8% decrease in ED visits between the pre-COVID period and the COVID-19 period. During COVID-19, ocular injury-related ED visits increased by 3.1% in those aged 65 to 74 years old but decreased by 4.3% in those aged 75 to 84 years old.
Contusions and abrasions were the most common ocular injury before (41.2%) and after (35.6%) the beginning of the pandemic. There was an increase in ocular injuries from gardening, lawn, landscaping and patio products from the pre-COVID period to the COVID period (13.8% vs. 15.3%) and a decrease in injuries involving construction tools (22.5% vs. 18.3%).
“There are several lifestyle and societal factors that may explain the effect of COVID-19 on these events,” the authors wrote. “Future studies should continue to assess how the epidemiology of ocular injury in this population develops with the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
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Zaki H, et al. Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the epidemiology of consumer product-related ocular injuries in the geriatric population in the United States. Presented at: Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology meeting; April 23-27, 2023; New Orleans.
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