Prevalence of vision impairment and refractive error in rural Nepalese children under five years of age
Bibliographic record
Abstract
CLINICAL RELEVANCE: Good vision is critical for childhood development and education. Pre-school vision screening is important for early detection and treatment of visual problems, and prevention of life-long vision loss. BACKGROUND: The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of vision impairment (VI) and refractive error (RE) in rural Nepalese children under five years of age. METHODS: A cross-sectional study, using multistage random sampling, was conducted in the targeted children between 6 and 59 months old, identified by household visits from rural communities of Nepal. Eye examinations [visual acuity (VA), binocular vision, cycloplegic refractions, and anterior and posterior segments] were performed at community health centres. Refractive errors were recorded as a spherical equivalent (SE) and their prevalence was categorised as myopia (SE ≤ -1.00D) and hyperopia (SE ≥ +2.00D) and emmetropia with astigmatism (SE of astigmatism cases ≥ 1.50DC), and their associations with age, gender and ethnicity were explored. RESULTS: Of 2226 participating children, VA of 93.4% was reliably tested and among these, 5.9% had VI (presenting VA less than 6/18 in the better eye). Uncorrected RE accounted for 88% of VI. The overall prevalence of RE was also 5.9% (95% CI: 5.0-7.0), which included the prevalence of myopia, hyperopia and emmetropia with astigmatism of 2.4% (1.8-3.1), 2.7% (2.0-3.3) and 0.8% (0.4-1.2), respectively. The prevalence of overall astigmatism (total cases with ≥ 1.50DC) was 1.6% (1.1-2.1). Infants had significantly higher hyperopia compared to pre-schoolers [OR (95% CI: 4.9 (2.6-9.2)], while toddlers had higher likelihood of developing myopia [1.2 (0.9-1.5)]; however, gender and ethnicity had no significant associations. CONCLUSIONS: The prevalence of VI was high and uncorrected RE was the main cause of VI in rural Nepalese children under five years of age. Early vision screening should be conducted in pre-school children to correct significant RE and avoid the risk of developing refractive VI and amblyopia.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".