Purpose
Recently we reported that Color Visual Acuity (CVA) of the normal eyes decreases with age, especially CVA in Red-Green axis significantly declines with age. We report here on changes in CVA of Normal eyes and tinted-IOL eyes with increasing age.
Methods
One hundred and nine normal eyes of 109 subjects and forty three tinted-IOL eyes of 43 subjects were enrolled in this study. All the subjects had no ocular disease or color anomaly, and the normal eyes had no lens opacity. The mean ages were 39.6±14.6 years old (Range, 16-72 years, normal eyes) and 68.2±10.3 years old (Range, 33-85 years, tinted-IOL eyes) respectively. All of them had best corrected visual acuity of 20/13. We set the background color as white point of the standard light D65, and Landolt rings were colored with 15 colors used in chroma 6 of New Color Test (Luneau Ophtalmologie). The luminance value of the background color and all the colors of Ladnolt rings were 30 [cd/m2] as a fixed value. The measured CVA was compared between age groups in 10-year increments. In addition, we also evaluated the difference in CVA between normal eyes and tinted-IOL eyes in the group of 60 years old and over that has relatively large sample numbers of both normal eyes and tinted-IOL eyes.
Results
Both of the groups of normal eyes and tinted-IOL eyes showed no significant difference in the CVA of “Blue-Purple” and “Green-Yellow” between the control groups ranging in age from 16 to 30 and 33 to 60 respectively and other age groups. (Kruskal-Wallis test, Dunn’s multiple comparison test, p>0.05) On the other hand, there were no significant difference in the CVA of any colors between the groups of normal eyes and tinted-IOL eyes in the age group of 60 to 70 (Mann-Whitney test, p>0.05).
Conclusions
“Blue-Purple” and “Green-Yellow” are the colors on the confusion locus of tritanopia. Most of the acquired color vision defects decrease the sensitivity to the colors on this line. However, there was no significant difference in the CVA of these colors. Furthermore, the CVA of tinted-IOL eyes also decreased with age in spite of having the best corrected visual acuity of 20/13. Therefore, there is a possibility that the CVA results of our study detected the decrease in visual function to colors from the retina to the nerve center excluding the effect of the crystalline lens.
Keywords: 414 aging: visual performance •
471 color vision •
567 intraocular lens