Abstract
Purpose :
According to the Colorblind awareness organization, color vision deficiency (CVD) affects 1 in 12 men (8.3%) and 1 in 200 women (0.5%) globally. In India (Kundu et al., 2020), the overall prevalence of CVD is 3.89% in males, followed by 0.18% in females. However, most cases are undiagnosed and only detected in screening programmes or during work empowerment. Besides this, CVD patients experience multiple difficulties in day-to-day life. The current study aimed to investigate the quality of life in a sample of CVD patients in India and how color vision impairment affects them psychologically, economically, and work-productivity wise.
Methods :
This descriptive and cross-sectional questionnaire study was conducted on N=44 diagnosed CVD patients (male=36 and female=8) who visited two eye hospitals in the Hyderabad region between 2020 to 2021. The comparison group included a age matched control group of normal color vision (normal CV) participants (N=12). In the current study, we validated and used a Telugu version of a questionnaire (CVD-QOL) which was developed and validated by Barry et al. in 2017 for CVD patients. In this study, Color vision was assessed by Ishihara color vision test. The questionnaire consists of twenty-three questions on Likert scale with variables (Lifestyle, Emotions and Work). Six-point Likert scale was used, with lower scores indicating worse quality of life (1=severe problem to 6=no problem).
Results :
Data analysis included 66 participants (CVD= 44 and normal CV= 12). Shapiro Wilk normality test resulted in normal data distribution. The mean age of participants did not show (p=0.064) a significant difference between the groups. There was a significant difference between CVD and normal CV participants for Color vision score (p<0.001). There was also a significant difference between the groups for the CVD-QoL variables, Lifestyle (p<0.001), Emotions (p<0.001) and Work (p=0.027) The results are shown in Table-1. The group differences among gender revealed that men tend to be more psychologically weaker in facing CVD than women.
Conclusions :
This study results revealed that color vision deficiency has a significant impact on the quality of life in this sample of Indian population. The mean scores on the questionnaire for Lifestyle, Emotions and Work was much lower than the UK sample (Barry et al. 2017) indicating that there was a higher impact of CVD on these domains in this population.
This abstract was presented at the 2022 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Denver, CO, May 1-4, 2022, and virtually.