Abstract
Purpose :
To evaluate the demographic data of patients seen in the Far Western region of Nepal at the Geta Eye Hospital. Compare pre-operative visual acuity with post-operative visual acuity at 24 hours and establish whether a correlation exits between post-operative day #1 visual acuity with post-operative week #4 visual acuity.
Methods :
A retrospective analysis was preformed at a single center – Geta Eye Hospital – in the Far Western Region of Nepal. Demographic, surgical data, and visual outcomes were collected over a 1-year period. All patients who underwent manual small incision cataract surgery between January 2013 and December 2013 met inclusion criteria. Patients were excluded if they underwent surgery other than manual small incision cataract surgery, surgery was performed under general anesthesia, patients were less than the age of 15, if the surgeon variable was listed as “guest”, the country listed as “other”, or the patient had known coexistent ocular diseases. Data was compiled in Microsoft Excel – including age, sex, country, city, intraocular pressure, pre-operative visual acuity and post-operative visual acuity, surgeon. The visual acuity was converted into LogMar and then the entire dataset was entered into SAS for analysis.
Results :
In 2013 – a total of 34,370 surgeries took place and 25,466 met both inclusion and exclusion criteria. Nearly 75% patients came from India while 25% identified as being from Nepal. The average age of Indian men and women were 61 and 58 years respectively. The average age of Nepali men and women were 65 and 63 years respectively. Roughly half the patients seen are women and half are men. Eighty-seven percent of pre-operative visual acuity fell worse than 20/400, which is the criterion for blindness according to the World Health Organization. At 24 hours, 97% of patients had visual acuity uncorrected at 20/200 or better, while 66% of patients had visual acuity of 20/60 or better. Only 3185 patients returned to their 4-week appointment. The visual acuity at that time correlated with visual acuity at 24 hours post-operatively.
Conclusions :
The Geta Eye Hospital is providing quality eye care to the Far Western Region in Nepal and to their larger Indian neighbor to the west. Women make up 2/3rds of blindness in Nepal attributed to cataracts, however the number of women being treated is equal to that of men suggesting the backlog is not being directly addressed.
This abstract was presented at the 2019 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Vancouver, Canada, April 28 - May 2, 2019.