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