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Editors Selection IGR 11-4
General Aspects: Assessment of glaucoma awareness
Comment by George Lambrou on:
47846 A proposed methodology for the assessment of glaucoma awareness in Greece: Introduction of the EIT-8G scale, Labiris G; Katsanos A; Fanariotis M et al., European Journal of Ophthalmology, 2011; 22: 95-103
In all initiatives devised in recent years to reduce the individual and social burden of glaucoma, through early diagnosis and intervention, raising public awareness plays a key role. Designing and running awareness campaigns, however, is not enough. Their impact and effectiveness must be assessed on an ongoing basis in order to upscale, adapt or discontinue them, ensuring the optimal use of awarenessraising efforts and resources. Such an assessment can only be achieved by quantifying the 'level of public awareness' through an appropriate instrument. It is an attempt to develop and validate such an instrument that Labiris et al. (1711) are describing in this paper.
A simple and easy-to-deploy instrument may help to quantify glaucoma awareness and to evaluate the impact of educational campaigns
The instrument that they developed is a simple questionnaire, comprising eight true/false statements. In their validation study, the questionnaires were completed by interviewers (independent researcher, not involved in provision of eye-care) and not by the subjects themselves. A second questionnaire, pertaining to the subjects' demographic, socio-economic and educational background was completed at the same time, for validation purposes. Questionnaires were completed by interviewing 175 glaucoma patients (recruited from the hospital outpatient glaucoma clinics on a consecutive-if-eligible basis) and 314 'healthy' control volunteers (similarly recruited from other outpatient clinics, and declaring that they did not have glaucoma).
In this patient sample, no statistical relation was found between glaucoma awareness and sex, age, rural/urban residence and professional group (with the exception of doctors). There was a non-significant trend for higher glaucoma awareness with increasing level of education (the association was significant in the control group only) and a similar trend for the association between awareness and income level (significant in the patient group only). Family history of glaucoma was significantly associated with higher disease awareness in both groups. Not surprisingly, doctors had a significantly higher level of awareness than the other professional groups. A surprising finding was that there was no difference in awareness between patients and controls, whereas one might expect patients with glaucoma to know more about their disease than patients without it. The authors argue, however that this is not inconsistent with literature and that the two groups were not demographically similar, which may have introduced confounding factors in the sample. In conclusion, the authors are introducing a simple instrument, which does not aim to explore in-depth glaucoma understanding, but which, being easier to deploy than lengthier questionnaires, may serve as basis for quantifying glaucoma awareness across populations and for evaluating the impact of educational campaigns.
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