One thousand one hundred and sixty-nine (1169) patients were examined in the Eye Clinic of University of Malaya Medical Centre over a period of three weeks to determine the prevalence of eye diseases and visual impairment. Age, gender, race, visual acuity and diagnosis of patients were noted from the case records. Cataract (385, 32.9%) was the most common eye disease seen in our study followed ...

Navigation assistance services for people with visual impairment pose the challenge of providing accurate guidance through non-visual navigation instructions. This paper proposes two techniques to guide user during assistance, and in particular turns straight paths. Both adopt a combination speech non-speech audio aim continuous, accurate, unobtrusive guidance. The solutions differ sonification...

OBJECTIVE To assess the association of self-reported systemic and ocular comorbid disease and visual function in Latino subjects. METHODS National Eye Institute 25-item Visual Function Questionnaire (NEI-VFQ-25) and eye examination data were obtained from 5380 participants in the Los Angeles Latino Eye Study, a population-based prevalence study of eye disease in Latino subjects 40 years and o...

BACKGROUND The World Health Organization estimates that there were 37 million blind people in 2002 and that the prevalence of blindness was 9% among adults in Africa aged 50 years or older. Recent surveys indicate that this figure may be overestimated, while a survey from southern Sudan suggested that postconflict areas are particularly vulnerable to blindness. The aim of this study was to cond...

Although concurrent vision and hearing loss are common in older adults, population-based data on their relationship with mortality is limited. This cohort study investigated the association between objectively measured dual sensory impairment (DSI) with mortality risk over 10 years. 2812 Blue Mountains Eye Study participants aged 55 years and older at baseline were included for analyses. Visual...

A boy developed early onset sarcoidosis, an extremely rare mimic of juvenile chronic arthritis. Renal granulomas caused severe hypertension and renal impairment, which was controlled by azathioprine and steroids. Severe uveitis caused visual impairment. Impaired growth and delayed puberty, not previously described in childhood sarcoidosis, required growth hormone and testosterone treatment.

Olfactory impairment constitutes one of the earliest signs of Alzheimer's disease in older adults with mild cognitive impairment. We investigated which aspects of neuropsychological measures are correlated with olfactory identification performance among older adults with mild cognitive impairment. Total of 220 participants with mild cognitive impairment (mean age 71.7 years) were examined. Odor...

AIM The survey aimed to identify the major treatable or preventable causes of visual loss in children attending blind schools in Sri Lanka so that appropriate control measures can be implemented. METHOD A total of 226 children with blindness (BL) or severe visual impairment (SVI) attending six schools for the blind were examined and details recorded using the WHO standard reporting form. RE...

AIMS To describe the causes of severe visual impairment and blindness in children in schools for the visually handicapped in the Czech Republic in 1998. METHODS Pupils attending all 10 primary schools for the visually handicapped were examined. A modified WHO/PBL eye examination record for children with blindness and low vision was used. RESULTS 229 children (146 males and 83 females) aged ...

In this issue of the Journal of the Chinese Medical Association, we have included an article from the Shihpai Eye Study. Therein, Kuang et al reported the relationship between visual impairment and 3-year mortality among older people in the Shihpai area in the city of Taipei. The association between visual impairment and mortality has been extensively studied over a lengthy period of time. The ...