Toward Eliminating Visual Impairment Due to Refractive Error

For proponents of public health, the US health care system can cause substantial consternation whenever gaps due to the fragmented nature of the system are revealed. This frustration becomes even more magnified when the solution to fixing the uncovered issue would be relatively inexpensive and offer significant health and quality of life benefits. In this issue of JAMA Ophthalmology, Dhablania and colleagues analyze the unmet refractive needs within the African American Eye Disease Study, a population-based study covering 6347 African American adults 40 years and older in Inglewood, California. Two of the primary outcomes of interest used to assess this were uncorrected refractive error (UCRE; defined as any patient whose vision could be improved ≥2 lines with refraction) and unmet refractive need (URN; defined as anyone with presenting visual acuity worse than 20/40 in the better-seeing eye that improves to 20/40 or better with refraction). The authors found that 14.6% of study participants had a UCRE and 5.4% had a URN. Although 2 URN ou tcomes are defined, they largely overlap with each other, and as such, we will focus on the URN1 outcome.
Source: JAMA Ophthalmology - Category: Opthalmology Source Type: research