Association of seeking ophthalmic assessment in children with parental history of refractive errors

OBJECTIVE: To find out the association of seeking ophthalmic assessment in children with parental history of refractive errors. METHODS: After the approval of ethical review board, an analytical cross-sectional study was conducted in eight high schools of public and private sector at Lahore during the period of seven months from August 2017 to March 2018. Multistage random sampling technique was opted and 2000 study subjects were recruited including 50% boys and 50% girls. Informed consent was obtained and data was collected on a structured questionnaire. The data was organized, entered in version 23 of IBM SPSS and analyzed by the use of statistical tools. RESULTS: Age of the respondents ranged between nine to 18 years with a mean of 13.40 ± 1.82 SD. Parental history of wearing spectacles was present in 21.3% of the fathers and 28.6% of the mothers. Moreover, 72.4% of the participants never visited eye care professional. Among private schools, an association was found between the visit of boys to eye care professional and maternal positive history of wearing spectacles (p-value 0.019). A significant association was found between the positive paternal history of wearing spectacles and visit of the female strudy subjects to an eye care professional (p-value 0.001). In public schools, there was an association between visit of children to eye care services and positive history of mothers about the use of spectacles (p-value 0.018). CONCLUSIONS: This study concludes that positive maternal history of wearing spectacles is associated with the ophthalmic examination of children in both public and private school.