Association found between severe visual impairment, overall poorer health
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Populations with severe visual impairment were found to have more physically unhealthy days as compared with their nonvisually impaired counterparts, according to data published in Optometry and Vision Science.
“Because vision impairment does not typically result in physical pain, physically unhealthy days represents a useful surrogate to characterize the overall health of the population with severe vision impairment, demonstrating that there are considerable health care
needs in that community,” Dean A. VanNasdale, OD, PhD, FAAO, associate professor at The Ohio State University College of Optometry, and colleagues wrote. “Identifying these important health linkages provides evidence that supports the incorporation of vision care into multidisciplinary approaches to chronic disease management.”
Researchers used data from the 2017 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a national state-based cross-sectional survey, to assess the association between physical health and vision impairment. The survey included 412,685 U.S. participants (55.6% women) who were divided into three cohorts based on age: 18 to 39 years, 40 to 64 years, and 65 years and older.
Vision impairment was self-reported and determined by one survey question: “Are you blind or do you have serious difficulty seeing, even when wearing glasses?” Participants were also asked to self-report the number of physically unhealthy days they experienced in the previous 30 days, which researchers then compared between populations with and without severe visual impairment.
“Physical health was uniformly worse in the visually impaired cohort in all 50 states in the oldest two cohorts and in 48 of the 50 states in the youngest cohort,” VanNasdale and colleagues wrote.
The overall prevalence of severe visual impairment was 4.7%. The mean number of physically unhealthy days among the severely visually impaired cohort was 10.63 vs. 3.68 in the cohort without severe visual impairment (P < .001).
The association had a significant impact on working-age adults, while the oldest population cohort was not disproportionately affected. The mean ratios of physically unhealthy days between those with severe vision impairment vs. those without was 2.91 in the 18- to 39-year-old cohort, 2.87 in the 40- to 64-year-old cohort, and 2.16 in the 65 year and older cohort.
The researchers speculated that visual impairment could be the result of chronic health conditions, which may explain the higher prevalence of physically unhealthy days.
“Further effort is needed to assess more upstream causes of physically unhealthy days in the population with vision impairment. This includes further analysis of population health data to identify specific comorbid dyads that result in the highest rates of compromised physical health to develop more precise, targeted interventions,” they wrote.
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