Prevalence of Ametropia in Ugandan Soldiers

Abstract

A U.S. Army Optometry team was dispatched as part of the Africa Crisis Initiative to Uganda to provide vision care to a battalion-size task force of the Ugandan Army. Their mission was to ensure vision readiness of the unit and to promote humanitarian good will. Of the 692 soldiers refracted, 117 required spectacle correction to be vision ready. One hundred one records were available to be examined. The distribution of ametropia among this population is consistent with other studies of Third World countries.

Population-Based Screening of Ophthalmic Disorders in a Cohort of Nigerian Army Personnel

“…The distribution of refractive error by type concurs with reports from around the world including Europe [1,2,7,11,12], Asia [9] and Africa [13]. Myopia was the most common refractive anomaly, with a higher prevalence found in more educated populations, similar to other reported studies [9,11,12].…”

“…This information was not available from existing reports from Africa [6,13] as they failed to report on the vision status of their study subjects. Spherical refractive errors and anterior segment disorders were the most common ophthalmic disorders and these have implications for needs-based and costeffective provision of eye care services.…”

“…The wide variations in reported prevalence have been attributed to differences in the description of specific ophthalmic disorders [1,2], differences in the sources of data (ranging from military health records to screening eye examinations) [1,2,4,6,9,10] and differences in measured ocular health criteria [2]. Existing literature on ophthalmic disorders among the military is dominated by reports on refractive errors, especially myopia [1,7,9,11,13]; however, colour vision defects [1,10], strabismus [1], glaucoma/ocular hypertension [1], sequelae of eye injuries [3, 4] and non-specific disorders of the ocular anterior and posterior segments [2] have all been reported.…”

“…After recruitment, successful entrants are not subjected to any other form of mandatory intra-service eye examination. Reports regarding the ocular health status of indigenous African military personnel are rare [6,13]. The aim of this study was therefore to provide reliable base-line prevalence data for inter-regional comparisons to assist planning for optimum military vision readiness.…”

Prevalence of Refractive Errors in Army Air Force Soldiers in Isfahan, 2017 - 2018

“…ulation. Different evaluations on military individuals and army arrival volunteers have shown that myopia is more frequent than hyperopia in different parts of the world (31)(32)(33)(34)(35). The prevalence of hyperopia (19.6%) was less than that of myopia (37.7%) in Swedish military recruits (31).…”