TY  - JOUR
VL  - 19
Y1  - 2019///
EP  - 8
N2  - Introduction: Globally, eye diseases are considered as one of the major contributors of nonfatal disabling conditions. In Bangladesh, 1.5% of adults are blind and 21.6% have low vision. Therefore, this paper aimed to identify the community-based prevalence and associated risk factors of eye diseases among slum dwellers of Dhaka city.

Methods: The study was carried out in two phases. In the first phase, a survey was conducted using multistage cluster sampling among 1320 households of three purposively selected slums in Dhaka city. From each household, one family member (??18?years old) was randomly interviewed by trained data collectors using a structured questionnaire. After that, each of the participants was requested to take part in the second phase of the study. Following the request, 432 participants out of 1320 participants came into the tertiary care hospitals where they were clinically assessed by ophthalmologist for presence of eye diseases. A number of descriptive and inferential statistics were performed using Stata 13.

Result: The majority of total 432 study participants were female (68.6%), married (82.6%) and Muslim (98.8%). Among them almost all (92.8%) were clinically diagnosed with eye disease. The most prevalent eye diseases were refractive error (63.2%), conjunctivitis (17.1%), visual impairment (16.4%) and cataract (7.2%). Refractive error was found significantly associated with older age, female gender and income generating work. Cataract was found negatively associated with the level of education, however, opposite relationship was found between cataract and visual impairment.   

Conclusion: Our study provides epidemiologic data on the prevalence of eye diseases among adult population in low-income urban community of Dhaka city. The high prevalence of refractive error, allergic conjunctivitis, visual impairment, and cataract among this group of people suggests the importance of increasing access to eye care services.
KW  - Refractive error
KW  -  Cataract
KW  -  Visual impairment
KW  -  and Bangladesh
UR  - https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/26013/
JF  - BMC Ophthalmology
TI  - Eye diseases: the neglected health condition among urban slum population of Dhaka, Bangladesh
SP  - 1
A1  - Sutradhar, Ipsita
A1  - Gayen, Priyanka
A1  - Hasan, Mehedi
A1  - Gupta, Rajat Das
A1  - Roy, Tapash
A1  - Sarker, Malabika
IS  - 38
CY  - London
AV  - public
ID  - heidok26013
PB  - BioMed Central
SN  - 1471-2415
ER  -