Study On Status And Influencing Factors Of Low Vision Among Primary And Middle School Students In Wuhan

ObjectiveTo understand the status and features of low vision among primary and middle school students in Wuhan, and explore the influencing factors so as to provide a scientific basis to school health workers for the prevention and control of low vision.MethodsA stratified cluster sampling method was taken to select a total of 11,400 students from four primary schools, four junior high schools, three high schools of Jiangan district and East and West Lakes distrct in Wuhan city. The ophthalmologists, medical assistants and optometrists took the visual inspection on the students to understand their eyesight status. The researchers surveyed the students on factors affecting their eyesight by self-made questionnaires. The collected data was input to computer with software Epidata 3.0 and made error correction. After that, the statistical software SPSS 12.0 was used to doχ2, t test, Logistic regression analysis on the data to make a visual status description , single-factor analysis and multi-factor analysis of the low vision among students. Results1. General situation:among the 11400 objects, 6680 students were detected low vision, therefore,the low vision rate is 58.6%. Of these, 5707 were short-sighted, which ratio is high up to 85.4%. 1221 students were hyperopia (18.3%), 2853 students were astigmatism (42.7%), 3679 students were anisometropia (55.1%).2. Comparison of different urban areas: the low vision rate of Jiangan district (3096, 66.5%) was higher than that of the East and West Lakes distrct (3584, 53.2%) (χ2 = 201.721, P <0.001).3. Comparison of different learning stages: the highest low vision detection rate was in the high school group (2580, 75.6%), followed by junior high school group (2408, 64.0%), and the lowest rate was in the primary school group (1712, 40.3%), which had a significant difference (χ2 = 1032.83, P < 0.001).4. Comparison of different gender and different age groups: the low vision detection rate was 63.3% among girls and 54.2% among boys .The low vision rate of girls was higher than that of boys, which had a significant difference (χ2 = 96.170, P<0.001).5. Influencing factors of low vision:χ2 test results showed that reading books distance, watching television distance, rest styles between two classes, whether or not adhere to do every day ocular gymnastics played significant impacts on low vision (P <0.001); t test results showed that the time of outdoor activities each day of low vision group was less than that of non-low vision group, while the time of near looking after school each day was more than that of non-low vision group, with statistically significant differences (P<0.001). Logistic regression showed that the habits which played greater impacts on students` eyesight were watching television distance, reading books distance, rest styles between two classes, whether or not adhere to do every day ocular gymnastics and time of reading and writing after-school. Watching television from the past, reading from the past, lying down reading books, too dark classroom lighting, too dark home lighting, long time doing homework and long time reading and writing after school were the risk factors, while playing outdoor activities in break time, doing sports long time every day, doing ocular gymnastics every day were the protective factors of low vision.Conclusions1. The prevalence of low vision among primary and middle school students in Wuhan city is at a higher state of nationalwide and has differences among regional, gender and learning stages. Furthermore, there is a trend that low vision rate increases along with age.2. The habits which played greater impacts on students` eyesight were watching television distance, reading distance, rest styles between two classes, whether or not adhere to do every day ocular gymnastics and time of reading and writing after-school.3. The protection of students` eyesight and the prevention of myopia is a major social project. we must mobilize the family, school and the community together with the parties concerned to take comprehensive measures, such as reducing academic burden on students, enhancing health education, vigorously carrying out sports activities, improving classroom lighting conditions, paying attention to nutrition, regularly inspecting the visual acuity and so on.