Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To determine the prevalence of, associations with and diagnoses leading to mild visual impairment or worse (logMAR >0.3) in middle-aged adults in the UK Biobank study. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: Prevalence estimates for monocular and binocular visual impairment were determined for the UK Biobank participants with fundus photographs and spectral domain optical coherence tomography images. Associations with socioeconomic, biometric, lifestyle and medical variables were investigated for cases with visual impairment and matched controls, using multinomial logistic regression models. Self-reported eye history and image grading results were used to identify the primary diagnoses leading to visual impairment for a sample of 25% of cases. RESULTS: For the 65 033 UK Biobank participants, aged 40-69 years and with fundus images, 6682 (10.3%) and 1677 (2.6%) had mild visual impairment or worse in one or both eyes, respectively. Increasing deprivation, age and ethnicity were independently associated with both monocular and binocular visual impairment. No primary diagnosis for the recorded level of visual impairment could be identified for 49.8% of eyes. The most common identifiable diagnoses leading to visual impairment were cataract, amblyopia, uncorrected refractive error and vitreoretinal interface abnormalities. CONCLUSIONS: The prevalence of visual impairment in the UK Biobank study cohort is lower than for population-based studies from other industrialised countries. Monocular and binocular visual impairment are associated with increasing deprivation, age and ethnicity. The UK Biobank dataset does not allow confident identification of the causes of visual impairment, and the results may not be applicable to the wider UK population.
83 Authors
- Martin McKibbin
- Tracey M Farragher
- Darren Shickle
- Tariq Aslam
- Paul Bishop
- Sarah Barman
- Jenny Barrett
- Sarah Mackie
- Peter Blows
- Michelle Chan
- Alexander Day
- Parul Desai
- Cathy Egan
- Dan Gore
- Anthony Khawaja
- Gerassimos Lascaratos
- Praveen Patel
- Sobha Sivaprasad
- Nicholas Strouthidis
- Dhanes Thomas
- Adnan Tufail
- Marta Ugarte
- Ananth Viswanathan
- Catey Bunce
- Chris Hammond
- Pirro Hysi
- Eoin O'sullivan
- Katie Williams
- Roxana Carare
- Sarah Ennis
- Jane Gibson
- Srini Goverdhan
- Andrew Lotery
- Jay Self
- Usha Chakravarthy
- Ruth Hogg
- Anne Hughes
- Michelle Mcgaughey
- Bernadette Mcguinness
- Gareth Mckay
- Euan Paterson
- Tunde Peto
- Jayne Woodside
- Antonietta Chianca
- Valentina Cipriani
- Paul Foster
- Marcus Fruttiger
- David Garway-heath
- Alison Hardcastle
- Pearse A Keane
- Peng Tee Khaw
- Phil Luthert
- Tony Moore
- Zaynah Muthy
- Caroline Thaung
- David Crabb
- Haogang Zhu
- Philippa Cumberland
- Jugnoo Rahi
- Bal Dhillon
- Danny Mitry
- Tom Macgillivray
- Cathie Sudlow
- Veronique Vitart
- Andrew Dick
- Cathy Williams
- John Gallacher
- Jeremy Guggenheim
- James Morgan
- Simon Harding
- Yalin Zheng
- Keith Martin
- John Yates
- Jennifer Yip
- Chris Owen
- Alicja Rudnicka
- Axel Petzold
- Carlota Grossi Sampedro
- Max Yates
- David Steel
- Irene Stratton
- Emanuele Trucco
- Stephen Vernon
1 Application
Application ID | Title |
1100 | The causes of and risk factors for visual impairment in middle-aged adults in the UK Biobank |
1 Return
Return ID | App ID | Description | Archive Date |
1461 | 1100 | Monocular and binocular visual impairment in the UK Biobank study: prevalence, associations and diagnoses | 5 Jul 2018 |