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Other Vision Loss
Cause data is not available for people with mild vision impairment.
(Opens in a new window) Also, there is limited information on the causes of vision impairment and blindness for people under 50 years of age.More standardisation and certainty of the causes of vision impairment and blindness would be beneficial in future research.
Other Vision Loss: Global summary from the VLEG study
A considerable proportion of the vision loss burden was listed as ‘residual causes’. This ‘other’ category includes causes for which we have limited data, such as:
- trachoma
- corneal diseases
- amblyopia
- ocular trauma
- onchocerciasis
- xerophthalmia and
- retinopathy of prematurity.
This limited data is caused by surveys not recording a cause for each reported case of vision loss, and the limited list of causes given in published materials.
However, some data are available. With trachoma, for example, WHO report the number of people at risk of trachoma has declined from 1.5 billion in 2002 to 136.9 million in 2020 – a 91% reduction.
Reference
Adelson, J., Bourne, R., Briant, P., Flaxman, S., Taylor, H., Jonas, J., Abdoli, A., Abrha, W., Abualhasan, A., Abu-Gharbieh, E. and Adal, T. (2020). Causes of blindness and vision impairment in 2020 and trends over 30 years, and prevalence of avoidable blindness in relation to VISION 2020: the Right to Sight: an analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study. Lancet Global Health.