Prevalence of Visual Impairment in School Children

The recent published article by Talebnejad et al sheds light on the prevalence of visual impairments and their associated determinants in school children in Shiraz, south of Iran.[1] We hope this imperative report spurs community action regarding the importance of population-based studies and provides basic information about the targeted prevention programs for children. Of course, the results should be compared with the outcomes of the Iranian State Welfare Organization (ISWO) visual screening programs for children. We previously published two major studies in this field that derived from the same sample size of the current study but unfortunately were not cited in the recent publication. Firstly, we included 262 eyes of Iranian primary school children in Shiraz between 6 and 13 years of age and found that intraocular pressure (IOP) and central corneal thickness (CCT) in healthy school children were positively correlated.[2] Secondly, in another published study, we analyzed the relationship between different parameters of Ocular Response Analyzer (ORA) and Corvis ST (CST) in school-aged children in Shiraz, and the relationship between parameters of these two instruments versus the IOP measured by Goldmann applanation tonometer (GAT) was evaluated. We found the highest IOP overestimation by CST and the lowest by cornealcompensated IOP (IOP-CC) compared with GAT. Overall, either low positive correlation or negligible correlation was found among the IOP measurements by three instruments.[3] Furthermore, there are several studies discussing the effect of race on the biometric data of ocular structures. This is an essential issue since recently in a metaanalysis, the authors showed that corneal thickness is thinner in children originating from mixed Malay- Indian race than in most other locations.