Abstract
Purpose :
The satisfaction of pediatric patients who have been diagnosed with asthma with their vision may be influenced by side effects from their asthma treatment as well as healthcare exposure. The epidemiology of complaints of non-optimal vision in the United States pediatric population with asthma has not been assessed among a nationally representative sample.
Methods :
We analyzed nationally representative 2016-2018 data for consecutive cross-sectional samples of children aged 0-17 in the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). The NHIS is conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) and is a face-to-face household interview of respondents included in a multistage, clustered sample of noninstitutionalized civilian US population. In each sampled family, if children were present, a responsible adult served as a proxy respondent for a randomly chosen sample child. The NCHS Institutional Review Board approved data collection for the NHIS for each year the survey was conducted. We calculated the odds ratio, 95% confidence interval, and p value associated between patients diagnosed with asthma and vision complaints.
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Results :
The NHIS had data from 28,222 separate interviews total in the child subset from 2016-2018, and the overall conditional response rates for sample children ranged from 92.1% to 93.5% for the survey years included in the study. 99.8% of respondents were able to answer yes or no to whether their child had visual complaints and whether they had been diagnosed with asthma. 192 respondents had both visual complaints and asthma, 3435 respondents had asthma without visual complaints, 771 respondents had vision complaints without asthma, and 23,757 respondents had neither vision complaints nor asthma. We calculated an odds ratio for having both vision complaints and asthma of 1.72 (95% CI, 1.46, 2.02) p<0.00001.
Conclusions :
We reject the null hypothesis and conclude that the frequency of visual complaints of pediatric patients with asthma is not the same as pediatric patients without asthma. Further exploration is needed regarding the significance of vision complaints in patients with asthma in this vulnerable population.
This is a 2020 ARVO Annual Meeting abstract.