Teachers trained to spot children with defective vision

Chennai: REEP - Refractive Errors, Education and Prevention - is a project aimed at children in Corporation schools in the city. In the two years since its launch, Rajan Eye Care Hospital in T. Nagar has reached out to about 107 schools by conducting free screening camps.

A total of 43,900 children below the age of 12 have been screened for eye ailments and given spectacles.

“We chose schoolchildren because it is necessary to identify children with defects in the eye. The younger the children the easier it is to cure them,” says Mohan Rajan, Medical Director of the hospital.

“A study in 1990 showed that the incidence of short sight (myopia) was 6.2 per cent and long sight (hypermetropia) was 4.6 per cent.

In 2005 the incidence was 7.4 per cent and 5.3 per cent. In 2015, it will be 10 per cent and 8 per cent.”

Both conditions are hereditary and can manifest as early as at the age of three.

Some children suffer from amblyopia in which the child could have double vision. It is necessary to diagnose early as the child could suffer from ‘lazy eye’ syndrome, Dr. Mohan says. When a child develops a squint it could be because the vision in one eye is normal while the brain does not register images from the other eye.

“These days children go to pre-nursery at the age of two-and-a-half. So we brought down the age of screening from five to two-and-a-half or three,” he says.

In order to spot children with defective vision early, the hospital has trained teachers in Corporation schools to identify children with squints and check their vision using the Snellen’s chart for schoolchildren who can read and a symbols chart for the younger age group. Children who cannot identify the penultimate line in the chart need therapy.

Children with lazy eye syndrome are given occlusion therapy. The vision in the good eye is blocked making the child to see with the other eye. This therapy will not work in children beyond the age of 10. If picked up early vision could be restored up to 80 per cent from merely 30 per cent, Dr. Mohan says.

Parents, teachers and children are counselled and taught about refractive errors.

This education is important as the higher the myopia greater are the chances of retinal detachment.

The hospital has tied up with several paediatric hospitals to screen preterm babies.

Children born before the full term of pregnancy and weighing about 1 kg could suffer from ‘retinopathy of prematurity’, a disorder that affects the retina.

The condition causes bleeding in the eyes of the babies and results in detachment of the retina.