Abstract
Purpose :
Many activities of daily living are known to be impacted by glaucomatous functional loss. However, previous studies have typically looked at the relation beween quality of life and the severity of loss as assessed by global indices. We asked whether the impact of functional loss depends not only on its severity, but also on its location within the visual field.
Methods :
The NEI VFQ-25 questionnaire was administered to 165 participants with glaucoma or glaucoma suspects from the Portland Progression Project cohort. 24-2 visual fields in both eyes were tested on the same day. Binocular pointwise sensitivities were calculated as the higher sensitivity between corresponding locations from the two eyes. Linear regression models were used to predict the change in each VFQ-25 subscale score that would be associated with a 1dB higher pointwise sensitivity, as each location separately.
Results :
The average Mean Deviation was -1.32dB in the better eye (range -14.1 to +2.5), and -3.57dB in the worse eye (range -20.0 to +1.6). The average composite score from the VFQ-25, i.e. the mean of the 11 vision-related subscale scores, was 87.5% (range 34.7 to 97.0). 8 of the 11 subscale scores had correlation >0.2 with better eye Mean Deviation. For each of those 8 subscales, the predicted change in score per 1dB higher pointwise binocular sensitivity is shown in the Figure.
Conclusions :
The impact of sensitivity loss is not uniform between visual field locations. The relative importance of different regions of the visual field varies between subscales. In particular, inferior loss appeared to have greater effect than superior loss on the Distance Activities, Driving, and Peripheral Vision subscales. The impact of vision loss on quality of life depends on the location of a patient's defect, not just its severity.
This abstract was presented at the 2023 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in New Orleans, LA, April 23-27, 2023.