Estudo epidemiológico para identificação de doenças oculares em estudantes de cidade de pequeno porte do Estado de Minas Gerais

Abstract

Preventing childhood blindness is one of the priorities of the World Health Organization´s global initiative to eliminate its preventable causes. At birth, the infant has an immature visual system, which needs adequate and continuous stimulation throughout childhood for its correct development. Any impediment to this process, if not bypassed by interventionist approaches, may result in permanent low vision, which leads to the necessity of developing strategies to early identify those children with greater urgency for specialized monitoring. Hence, this study seeks to establish the ocular epidemiological profile of all children enrolled from the first to the fifth year of Elementary school in the city of Nazareno-MG, with referral to specialized Ophthalmology services. It is proposed to carry out a screening to obtain information that may help public agencies to better clarify the situation in the region in terms of children´s eye health, providing current results necessary for composing databases and guiding public policy actions in eye health. The study also aims to validate the questionnaire applied to aid in visual screening programs. The experimental phase was divided into three stages: I) Questionnaire regarding the infant´s general and ocular health history; gestational and perinatal history; family history of ocular comorbidities; complaints of low vision and other ocular symptoms reported by the child or their guardians. II) Ophthalmological screening, with ectoscopy, visual acuity, Hirschberg, pupillary reflexes, and ocular motility tests. Children with uncorrected visual acuity worse than 0.8 in the worst eye or other changes to the tests, with inconclusive or uncooperative examination were referred to the third stage. III) Complementation of the exam with refraction, biomicroscopy and fundoscopy. Alterations identified on examination were classified according to the suggested ophthalmological diagnoses. There was good adherence by those involved, which made it possible to draw the ocular epidemiological profile of the studied population, in which there was a high frequency of ophthalmological complaints. The methodology used, in its three different stages, was adequate to achieve the proposed objectives.