Optometric Practice Patterns for Acute Central and Branch Retinal Artery Occlusion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Optometrists are often the first providers to evaluate patients with acute vision loss and are often the first to diagnose a central retinal artery occlusion (CRAO). How quickly these patients present to the optometrist, are diagnosed, and referred for evaluation are major factors influencing the possibility of acute therapeutic intervention. Our aim was to survey the U.S. optometric community to determine current optometric practice patterns for management of CRAO. METHODS: An anonymous seven-question survey was emailed in 2020 to the 5,101 members of the American Academy of Optometry and the 26,502 members of the American Optometric Association. RESULTS: Of 31,603 optometrists who were sent the survey, 1,926 responded (6.1%). Most respondents (1,392/1,919, 72.5%) worked in an optometry-predominant outpatient clinic and were less than 30 minutes from a certified stroke center (1,481/1,923, 77.0%). Ninety-eight percent (1,884/1,922) of respondents had diagnosed less than 5 CRAOs in the previous year, and 1,000/1,922 (52.0%) had not diagnosed a CRAO in the prior year. Of the optometrists who diagnosed at least one CRAO in the previous year, 661/922 (71.7%) evaluated these patients more than 4 hours after the onset of vision loss. Optometrists who diagnosed a CRAO or branch retinal artery occlusion referred patients to an emergency department (ED) affiliated with a certified stroke center (844/1,917, 44.0%), an outpatient ophthalmology clinic (764/1,917, 39.9%), an ED without a stroke center (250/1,917, 13.0%), an outpatient neurology clinic (20/1,917, 1.0%), or other (39/1,917, 2.0%); most (22/39, 56.4%) who responded "other" would refer to a primary care physician. CONCLUSIONS: Optometrists are likely the first providers to evaluate patients with acute vision loss, including from a retinal artery occlusion. However, only 6.1% of optometrists responded to our survey despite 2 reminder emails, likely reflecting the lack of exposure to acute retinal artery occlusions, and a potential lack of interest of optometrists in participating in research. Of the optometrists who reported evaluating a CRAO in the previous year, less than 29% saw the patient within 4 hours of vision loss. In addition, a large portion of optometrists are referring acute CRAO patients to outpatient ophthalmology clinics, delaying appropriate acute management. Therefore, it is imperative that optometrists and ophthalmologists are educated to view acute retinal arterial ischemia as an acute stroke and urgently refer these patients to an ED affiliated with a stroke center. The delay in patient presentation and these referral patterns make future clinical trials for acute CRAO challenging.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".