The impact of childhood glaucoma on psychosocial functioning and quality of life: a review of the literature

Abstract

We present a novel comprehensive literature review of studies of the psychosocial functioning (PF) and quality of life (QoL) of patients with childhood glaucoma and their caregivers. Our findings demonstrate variable study quality and approach, as well as inconsistent results relating to the association of glaucoma-specific factors and sociodemographic variables with measured PF and QoL. Future studies should focus on the development of culturally cognizant and standardized assessment tools, execution of multi-center longitudinal studies with global representation, evaluation of PF and QoL among siblings and childhood glaucoma providers, and implementation of interventions to improve patient and caregiver PF and QoL.

Fig. 1. Flow diagram of study selection.

This outlines the number of papers included in the review (“n”) after screening sequentially by titles, abstracts, and full texts (white boxes on the left). It also includes the number of papers removed (“n”) due to an irrelevant topic or population identified through each screening step (grey boxes on the right).

Fig. 2. Geographic distribution of literature.

The y-axis includes the countries where studies were conducted, and the x-axis tallies the number of studies produced per country. India conducted the highest number of studies relevant to this topic, with 8 total papers included in this review.