Uncorrected refractive error and associated factors among primary school children in Debre Markos District, Northwest Ethiopia

BMC Ophthalmology

Research Article

Sintayehu Aweke Sewunet¹  Kassahun Ketema Aredo²  Molla Gedefew³ 

[1] Debre Markos referral hospital, East Gojjam Zone, Amhara Regional State, Debre Markos, Ethiopia;Department of Public Health, Debre Markos University, College of Medicine and Health Sciences, PO Box: 269, Debre Markos, Ethiopia;Department of medicine, Gamby College of Medical Sciences, Bahir Dar, Ethiopia;

关键词: Refractive error;    Myopia;    Students;    School;    Children;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2415-14-95

 received in 2013-12-12, accepted in 2014-07-22,  发布年份 2014

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundUncorrected Refractive Error is one of the leading cause amblyopia that exposes children to poor school performance. It refrain them from productive working lives resulting in severe economic and social loses in their latter adulthood lives. The objective of the study was to assess the prevalence of uncorrected refractive error and its associated factors among school children in Debre Markos District.MethodA cross section study design was employed. Four hundred thirty two students were randomly selected using a multistage stratified sampling technique. The data were collected by trained ophthalmic nurses through interview, structured questionnaires and physical examinations. Snellens visual acuity measurement chart was used to identify the visual acuity of students. Students with visual acuity less than 6/12 had undergone further examination using auto refractor and cross-checked using spherical and cylindrical lenses. The data were entered into epi data statistical software version 3.1 and analyzed by SPSS version 20. The statistical significance was set at α ≤ 0.05. Descriptive, bivariate and multivariate analyses were done using odds ratios with 95% confidence interval.ResultOut of 432 students selected for the study, 420 (97.2%) were in the age group 7–15 years. The mean age was 12 ± 2.1SD. Overall prevalence of refractive error was 43 (10.2%). Myopia was found among the most dominant 5.47% followed by astigmatism 1.9% and hyperopia 1.4% in both sexes. Female sex (AOR: 3.96, 95% CI: 1.55-10.09), higher grade level (AOR: 4.82, 95% CI: 1.98-11.47) and using computers regularly (AOR: 4.53, 95% CI: 1.58-12.96) were significantly associated with refractive error.ConclusionThe burden of uncorrected refractive errors is high among primary schools children. Myopia was common in both sexes. The potential risk factors were sex, regular use of computers and higher grade level of students. Hence, school health programs should work on health information dissemination and eye health care services provision.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Sewunet et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.