Research

Visual Impairment, Optical Correction, and Their Impact on Activity Limitations in Elderly Persons: The POLA Study

Europe   

The loss of autonomy among older persons is a major public health issue. In the disablement process model, chronic and acute conditions leas to psychological and physical deficiencies and ultimately to difficulty in preforming acitivites of daily life. In elderly persons, visual impairment is one of the major deficiencies leading to activity limitations and can be causes by either eye trauma or ocular diseases( affecting the ability to receive or precess visual information), or by refractive errors (a failure of the eye to focus images sharply on the retina). Refractive errors affect approximately a third of the US and Western European populations.


We estimated the proportion of uncorrected refractive errors and the potential improvement in the daily life functioning that could be brought about by optimal visual correction.

Publication date

July 14, 2015

Publication

Archives of Internal Medicine, American Medicine Association

Sponsor Institution

Institut National de la Sante´ et de la Recherche Me´dicale, Paris, France; by grants from the Fondation de France, Department of Epidemiology of Ageing, Paris, the Fondation pour la Recherche Me´dicale, Paris; the Re´gion Languedoc-Roussillon, Montpellier, France; and the Association Retina-France, Toulouse; and by financial support from Rhoˆ nes Poulenc, Essilor, Specia, and Horiba ABX (Montpellier) and the Centre de Recherche et d’Information Nutritionnelle (Paris).

Authors

Vincent Daien, MD Karine Pe´rès, PhD Max Villain, PhD Alain Colvez, MD Ce´cile Delcourt, PhD Isabelle Carrière, PhD
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