21 Long-Term Ophthalmologic Outcome of Young Adults Born Extremely Preterm
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Primary Subject area Ophthalmology Background Retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) remains the dominant cause of severe visual impairment in childhood in North America and Europe. With the salient improvement in neonatal care since the 1980s, more and more very/extremely premature infants survived and are now reaching adulthood. Premature birth interferes with the critical period of retinal maturation and foveal development. The development of ROP further damages the retina and its vasculature. So far, outcome studies on visual functions and ocular structure in adults born preterm remain scarce. Objectives The first aim of this study is to describe the visual function and retinal structure in a cohort of young adults who were born prematurely. With the recognition of the insidious nature of ROP, we also aimed to investigate if ROP could exert a “second hit” beyond prematurity. Design/Methods This cross-sectional observational study compared visual function of young adults (18-29 years old) born prematurely (< 30 weeks of gestational age [GA]) versus full-term controls. Participants were categorized into three groups: preterm without ROP, preterm with ROP, and term. Comprehensive ophthalmologic examination was performed with blinding to preterm and ROP status. Best corrected visual acuity (BCVA) was assessed with a standardized linear Snellen chart and contrast sensitivity (CS) with the Vistech system. When analyzing BCVA, refractive errors, and contrast sensitivities, we further grouped data based on the strong eyes (better BCVA) and the weak eyes (worse BCVA). Area-under-the-curve (AUC) analysis was performed to gauge the overall CS. Group comparisons were done using ANOVA. Results In this study, 88 individuals born prematurely and 86 individuals born full-term were recruited. Among the strong eyes of the 3 groups, there was no significant difference for BCVA or refractive errors (see image). Among the weak eyes, the preterm with ROP group had the worst BCVA and refractive outcomes, compared to the preterm without ROP and term groups. In the strong eyes, the CS AUC of the preterm with ROP group (16.22 ± 2.69 p<0.0001) was significantly lower than both the preterm without ROP (18.13 ± 2.01) and term (19.55 ± 2.48) groups. In the weak eyes, the AUC of the 3 groups showed a significant and progressive decline from the term group (18.9 ± 2.84) to the preterm without ROP group (18.29 ± 2.14), then to the preterm with ROP group (15.24 ± 2.21). Conclusion In our cohort of young adults born preterm, prematurity alone did not affect their BCVA and refractive errors. However, ROP was independently associated with a lower BCVA, higher refractive errors, and a reduced contrast sensitivity. Our data have shown that prematurity and ROP have independent effects on contrast sensitivity. This study highlights the necessity of long-term ophthalmologic follow-ups for adults who were born prematurely.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".