[Quality of life assessment of cataract surgery in elderly population of Doumen County, Guangzhou Province]

Abstract

Objective: To evaluate the outcome of cataract surgery in elderly population in Doumen County, Guangdong Province by assessment of subjective visual function and quality of life.

Methods: All the cataract postoperative subjects were identified in the population-level. Visual Function and Quality of Life (VF/QOL) questionnaire developed by National Eye Institute, USA in developing countries was used as the instrument. This Questionnaire was administered by four trained-interviewers in all subjects with visual acuity less than 0.1 in either eye (treated as visual impairment cases), One in every 20 persons with visual acuity better than 0.3 (treated as normal control cases) in both eyes (un-operated group) and all cataract postoperative cases (operated group).

Results: In 5 342 cross-sectional examined persons, individuals who could be successfully interviewed included 99 (90.8%) cataract postoperative cases, 535 (85.5%) visual impairment cases and 119 normal control ones. On a 0 - 100 scale, medium total scores of VF and QOL diminished from 92 to 2 and from 100 to 19 respectively along with visual status from normal to severe blindness in the un-operated group. Similar findings on visual status and VF/QOL scores were found in the operated group. The overall scores of VF and QOL were 40 and 56 for operated one and 56 and 72 for un-operated one. After adjusted the confounding effect of visual status, age, sex and education by multivariate regression model, the difference of QOL scores between un-operated and operated group was significant (P = 0.015), while no significant difference (P = 0.199) was found in VF scores.

Conclusions: The scores of VF and QOL are significantly correlated with the visual status. Subjective visual function and quality of life could not be significantly improved after cataract surgery in this target population. Concerns should be paid in postoperative follow-up, aphakic correction and social-psychological rehabilitation.