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Editors Selection IGR 23-4
Miscellaneous: Looking through a glaucoma patient's eyes
Comment by Pradeep Ramulu on:
52541 How does glaucoma look?: patient perception of visual field loss, Crabb DP; Smith ND; Glen FC et al., Ophthalmology, 2013; 120: 1120-1126
Recent papers have documented the functional impact of glaucoma on the individual. Here, Crabb and colleagues take a step back, exploring the visual impact of glaucoma using two different approaches. First, the authors present 6 different images (one unmodified and five modified) to 50 glaucoma patients and asked them which image which best reflects how they see the world. Second, they asked patients open-ended questions regarding how glaucoma affects their vision and function.
The images that patients most frequently selected as representative of their vision were: (1) an image with patchy blurring (54%); (2) an unaltered image (26%); and (3) an image where objects or object details are missing (16%). No participants chose images where portions of the image were blacked out. Patient responses to an open-ended question about how glaucoma affects their vision were cleverly displayed as a word cloud which suggest that 'missing' and 'blurred' vision are the most common visual manifestations of glaucoma.
The authors' work debunks the common misconception that glaucoma 'blacks out' portions of the visual field, and suggests that portions of patient's field of view are either blurry or missing instead
The authors acknowledge that real-world vision is a dynamic phenomenon that cannot be fully understood by static images, and also that there may be limitations to asking patients to select an image representing what they see while viewing images with their diseasemodified visual ability. Nonetheless, the images chosen by patients give us an idea of what glaucoma looks like, can help us better relate to our patients, and can help us distinguish whether visual symptoms are glaucoma-related or not glaucoma-related in patients with other visual conditions. Finally, the authors' work debunks the common misconception that glaucoma 'blacks out' portions of the visual field, and suggests that portions of patient's field of view are either blurry or missing instead.
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