Abstract
Purpose :
To investigate the prevalence of severe visual impairment (SVI) in Mexican adults using data from the 2018 National Health and Nutrition Survey (Ensanut 2018)
Methods :
The Ensanut is a probabilistic survey representative of the Mexican population at the national, regional, and urban/rural level, conducted regularly by the National Institute of Public Health and the National Institute of Statistics, Geography, and Informatics. This survey sampled 44,069 households and interviewed 43,070 people older than 20 years about sociodemographic factors, educational attainment, health and nutrition, and self-reported diseases (i.e., diabetes and visual disability). The household response rate was 87% and represented 126.5 million inhabitants. Visual disability was evaluated using the Washington Group on disability statistics methodology, categorizing difficulty seeing as: 1) no difficulty, 2) some difficulty, 3) a lot of difficulty, and 4) cannot do at all. SVI was defined as participants who, even with glasses or contact lenses, self-identified as having a lot of difficulty seeing or cannot do at all. We estimated survey-weighted prevalence of SVI and their 95% confidence intervals (CI) considering the survey design and sampling weights. We estimated the association between social/health predictors and SVI using survey-weighted logistic regression.
Results :
The SVI prevalence in adults aged >20 was 3.0% (95%CI 2.7, 3.2). Age was strongly associated with SVI (1.1% (0.9, 1.4) among those aged 20 to 40 years and 8.0% (7.2, 9.0) among those over 60. The prevalence of people wearing glasses was 37.9% (37.1, 38.7), and the SVI prevalence was similar between people with and without glasses (3% and 2.9%). Among people with diabetes, the SVI prevalence was 8.4% (7.3, 9.7) and 2.3% (2.1, 2.6) among people without diabetes. Only 17.0% (15.3, 18.8) of people with diabetes had an eye screening during the last year, despite 43.9% (41.8, 46.0) reporting reduced vision due to diabetes. Higher SVI prevalence was seen among people with lower socioeconomic status, from rural areas, and with lower educational levels (Figure 1).
Conclusions :
The SVI prevalence in Mexico increased with age and was higher among people with diabetes and marginalized populations. Our prevalence estimates are similar to those of the Los Angeles Latino Eye Study (3%) but lower than Proyecto VER in Arizona (8.2%) and the 2019 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (5.2%).
This abstract was presented at the 2023 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in New Orleans, LA, April 23-27, 2023.