Abstract
Purpose :
Low Vision Rehabilitation (LVR), in contrast to restorative procedures, uses behavioral strategies to help the patient perform vision-dependent activities. Predicting the treatment outcomes for individual patients is difficult. Successful LVR may depend on motivation and engagement by the patient in addition to level of visual impairment and patient's rehabilitation potential. Our aim is to determine if specific personality traits help predict LVR outcomes.
Methods :
Data were collected as part of the Low Vision Rehabilitation Outcomes Study (LVROS), a prospective, observational study of new low vision patients seeking outpatient LVR services from 28 clinical centers in the U.S. from 2008 through 2011. The Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R) was administered by telephone at baseline to a consecutive series of 132 of the 768 study patients. The Activity Inventory (AI), a visual function questionnaire administered before and 6-9 months after LVR, was used to measure change in overall visual ability and in 4 functional domains: reading, visual motor, visual information processing and mobility (dependent variables). Neuroticism, Extraversion and Openness (NEO) were selected as the independent variables in linear regression models.
Results :
The three NEO personality traits were mutually independent and not significantly correlated with depression or cognition. No significant relationship was observed between extraversion or openness traits and baseline visual abilities. Neuroticism was positively predictive of baseline mobility function (p=0.02). Neuroticism was also positively predictive of improvements in reading (p<0.003) and visual motor function (p=0.01) after LVR. Similarly, higher extraversion levels were predictive of improvements in visual information processing (p=0.03), while higher openness levels were predictive of improvements in reading function (p=0.02). No personality traits were predictive of changes in mobility function or overall change in visual ability (p>0.05 for all). When applying Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons on changes in visual ability after LVR, only the relationship between neuroticism and improvements in reading function achieved statistical significance (alpha <0.05).
Conclusions :
Assessment of personality traits, especially neuroticism, may provide useful information for predicting LVR outcomes in patients.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2018 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Honolulu, Hawaii, April 29 - May 3, 2018.