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How many people in England and Wales are registered partially sighted or blind because of age-related macular degeneration?

ABSTRACT: The purpose of the study was to determine what proportion of new certifications between 1 April 2007 and 31 March 2008 could be attributed to age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and to describe the AMD-certified population in England and Wales.An electronic version of the Certificate of Vision Impairment form (CVI), the ECVI, was used at the certifications office to transfer information from the paper-based certificates into a database. The electronic certifications data set was queried for all certificates completed between 1 April 2007 and 31 March 2008 with the main cause of certifiable visual loss being AMD or with the main cause of certifiable visual loss being multiple pathology but a contributory cause being AMD. The electronic data set was adapted so that a distinction could be made between geographic atrophy (GA) and neovascular AMD (nAMD).The Certifications Office received 23 185 CVIs between April 2007 and March 2008, of whom 9823 (42%) were people registered severely sight impaired (SSI) and 12 607 (52%) were certified as sight impaired (SI). AMD contributed to 13 000 causes of registration on the CVI forms during this period and was the main cause in 11 015 people. In these 11 015 people, GA accounted for 49.3%, nAMD 35.1%, and AMD not specified 15.7%.The data in this report provide detailed information on CVI registration due to AMD before the widespread adoption of ranibizumab therapy in NHS practice and provide an insight into the burden of vision loss due to AMD at a time of great change in the management of nAMD.

SUBMITTER: Rees A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4094800 | biostudies-other | 2014 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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Project description:Some blind people have developed a unique technique, called echolocation, to orient themselves in unknown environments. More specifically, by self-generating a clicking noise with the tongue, echolocators gain knowledge about the external environment by perceiving more detailed object features. It is not clear to date whether sighted individuals can also develop such an extremely useful technique. To investigate this, here we test the ability of novice sighted participants to perform a depth echolocation task. Moreover, in order to evaluate whether the type of room (anechoic or reverberant) and the type of clicking sound (with the tongue or with the hands) influences the learning of this technique, we divided the entire sample into four groups. Half of the participants produced the clicking sound with their tongue, the other half with their hands. Half of the participants performed the task in an anechoic chamber, the other half in a reverberant room. Subjects stood in front of five bars, each of a different size, and at five different distances from the subject. The dimension of the bars ensured a constant subtended angle for the five distances considered. The task was to identify the correct distance of the bar. We found that, even by the second session, the participants were able to judge the correct depth of the bar at a rate greater than chance. Improvements in both precision and accuracy were observed in all experimental sessions. More interestingly, we found significantly better performance in the reverberant room than in the anechoic chamber. The type of clicking did not modulate our results. This suggests that the echolocation technique can also be learned by sighted individuals and that room reverberation can influence this learning process. More generally, this study shows that total loss of sight is not a prerequisite for echolocation skills this suggests important potential implications on rehabilitation settings for persons with residual vision.

Project description:BackgroundThe recent World Report on Disability highlighted violence as a leading cause of morbidity among disabled people. However, we know little about the extent to which people with disability experience different violence types, and associated health/economic costs. The recent introduction of disability measures into the England&Wales victimization survey provided an opportunity to address this gap.Methods and findingsAnalysis of the 2009/10 British Crime Survey (BCS), a nationally representative cross-sectional survey of 44,398 adults living in residential households in England&Wales. Using multivariate logistic regression, we estimated the relative odds of being a victim of past-year violence (physical/sexual domestic or non-domestic violence) in people with disability compared to those without, after adjusting for socio-demographics, behavioural and area confounders. 1256/44398(2.4%) participants had one or more disabilities including mental illness ('mental illness') and 7781(13.9%) had one or more disabilities excluding mental illness ('non-mental disability'). Compared with the non-disabled, those with mental illness had adjusted relative odds (aOR) of 3.0(95% confidence interval (CI) 2.3-3.8) and those with non-mental disability had aOR of 1.8(95% CI: 1.5-2.2) of being a victim of past-year violence (with similar relative odds for domestic and non-domestic violence). Disabled victims were more likely to suffer mental ill health as a result of violence than non-disabled victims. The proportion of violence that could be attributed to the independent effect of disability in the general population was 7.5%(CI 5.7-9.3%), at an estimated cost of £1.51 billion. The main study limitation is the exclusion of institutionalised people with disability.ConclusionsPeople with disability are at increased risk of being victims of domestic and non-domestic violence, and of suffering mental ill health when victimized. The related public health and economic burden calls for an urgent assessment of the causes of this violence, and national policies on violence prevention in this vulnerable group.

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How many people in England and Wales are registered partially sighted or blind because of age-related macular degeneration?

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