Profile of Ocular Trauma in Pediatric Population in a Tertiary Care Hospital

BACKGROUND Ocular trauma is the major cause for preventable monocular blindness and visual impairment worldwide. It accounts for 8%-14% of total injuries in the pediatric age group. Various studies have shown its higher incidence in this age group. They have different patterns of ocular injuries than adults and have age specific type of injuries. The number of blind years that a child lives with compared to an adult is far more. Most of the previous studies have been on ocular trauma among the adult population, specifically the factory workers in the city of Ludhiana. Moreover, this study aimed to derive a relation between the time of presentation from the injury and the final visual outcome which has rarely been reported in other studies. Profile of ocular trauma in an area is a dynamic and ever changing trend. Therefore, we proposed to study the profile of ocular trauma in pediatric population presenting to our hospital. METHODS A total of 60 patients between the age of 0 to 17 years were included in this study. The study was conducted from 15th December 2020 to 31st May 2022. Complete ocular examination was done at the time of presentation and after management; The best corrected visual acuity was noted at the end of three months. RESULTS Among our study subjects 45% belonged to the age group of 11-17 years. A male predominance (68.3%) was noted. For most of the subjects, the duration between time of injury and time of examination was less than 6 hours. The proportion of closed globe type of injury (80%) was significantly higher as compared to open globe (8.3%) and extraocular type of injury (11.7%). At the 3 month follow up, out of the 53 study subjects, 92.45% had good visual outcome (VO), 3.77% had fair VO and 3.77% had poor VO respectively. CONCLUSIONS Most of the pediatric ocular trauma may be avoided, which emphasizes the value of health education, adult supervision, and the implementation of suitable interventions to lessen the frequency and severity of trauma. Better visual outcome is expected with a shorter duration between time of injury and time of presentation.