Healthcare access and resources may be important barriers to consider in addressing the need for refractive correction of visual impairment, say authors of a new study.

In addition, the prevalence of visual impairment is higher in persons who are of black, Hispanic, or other ethnicity, or who are poor, less educated, and lack private health insurance, according to a study in the May 10 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Vision Evaluation

Susan Vitale and colleagues with the National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md., analyzed data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which included a vision evaluation in a mobile examination center for 13,265 participants from 1999 to 2002.

Visual impairment was defined as having sharpness of vision of 20/50 or worse in the better-seeing eye, and visual impairment due to uncorrected refractive error was defined as visual impairment that improved, aided by automated refraction, to 20/40 or better in the better-seeing eye.

Barriers to Correction

Although these findings are not unexpected, they suggest that healthcare access and resources may be important barriers to consider in addressing the need for refractive correction of visual impairment, the study authors said.

The provision of corrective lenses to those individuals in need will be an important public health endeavor with implications for safety and quality of life.