Global blind population set to triple by 2050
The prevalence of blindness and vision impairment
worldwide is set to triple from nearly 36 million to 38.5 million by 2020 and
115 million in 2050 due to an increase in the ageing population, a study has claimed.
The study, published in the journal Lancet Global Health, showed that in 2015
an estimated 36 million people were blind, 217 million were moderately or
severely vision impaired, and 188 million had mild vision impairment.
Near-vision impairment due to uncorrected presbyopia affected 1.09 billion
people aged 35 years or older. Most of the blind people live in South Asia
(11.7 million, 80 per cent), followed by East Asia (6.2 million) and Southeast
Asia (3.5 million). Some parts of sub-Saharan Africa also have particularly
high rates.
“There is an ongoing reduction in the age-standardised
prevalence of blindness and visual impairment, yet the growth and ageing of the
world’s population is causing a substantial increase in number of people
affected,” said Rupert Bourne, Professor at the Anglia Ruskin University in the
UK. Further, there are more than 200 million people with moderate to
severe vision impairment, which is expected to rise to more than 550 million by
2050. For the study, the team estimated trends in prevalence of vision
impairment and their uncertainties, by sex, for 188 countries in the 21 Global
Burden of Disease (GBD) regions, from 1990 to 2015. “Even mild visual
impairment can significantly impact a person’s life. For example, reducing
their independence… as it often means people are barred from driving,” Bourne
was quoted as telling the BBC. Visual impairment also limits people’s
educational and economic opportunities, Bourne said.
The study calls for better investment in treatments,
such as cataract surgery, and ensuring people have access to appropriate
vision-correcting glasses. “Interventions provide some of the largest returns
on investment. They are some of the most easily implemented interventions in
developing regions,” Bourne said. “They are cheap, require little
infrastructure and countries recover their costs as people enter back into the
workforce,” he added.
05.08.2017
It’s not how you
start, it’s how you finish
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