Original articleRefractive Errors in a Rural Chinese Adult Population: The Handan Eye Study
Section snippets
Study Design and Procedure
The Handan Eye Study is a population-based, cross-sectional study of eye diseases among 7557 Chinese people aged ≥30 years from Handan, China. The study adhered to the Declaration of Helsinki. Ethics approval was obtained from the Beijing Tongren Hospital Ethical Committee and all participants signed written informed consent before participating in the study.8, 9
In brief, subjects ≥30 years of age were selected using a randomized, clustered, sampling technique with probabilities proportionate
Results
A total of 6830 participants (90.4% response rate) were recruited and completed an eye examination; however, 114 (1.7%) who were examined at home did not have refractive error data. An additional 188 (2.8%) persons had no refraction data for their right eye (either missing or patients had corneal opacities, dense cataracts, or other media opacities), 32 subjects (0.5%) had prior cataract extraction in their right eyes, and 5 (0.1%) were phthisical or had severe anomalies of the anterior or
Discussion
This study provides new population-based data on the prevalence of refractive errors in Chinese people aged ≥30 years living in a rural village setting in mainland China. We report an overall prevalence of 26.7% for myopia, 1.8% for high myopia, and 15.9% for hyperopia. Our study showed a classic “U-shaped” pattern of myopia, with higher rates in younger and older people, the latter reflecting increasing prevalence of age-related cataract. We found that 24.5% of our subjects had astigmatism
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Manuscript no. 2008-1327.
Financial Disclosure(s): The authors have no proprietary or commercial interest in any of the materials discussed in this article.
Supported by National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program), Grant 2007CB512201 from the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China, Program of Health Policy for blindness prevention from Ministry of Health the People's Republic of China, Partially funded by the Key Technologies R&D Program. No.2006-10903 from Bureau of Science and Technology of Handan city, Hebei Province, China. With additional support from Beijing Tongren Hospital and the key discipline fund of Bureau of Health, Handan city, Hebei Province, China.