Traumatic Blindness—A Clinical Study

Background: As a cause of blindness, ocular injury constitutes 1.5% of all causes of blindness. In the developed world, trauma is also the leading cause of unilateral blindness and is preceded only by the cataract as a cause for vision impairment. Males are much more likely than females to sustain ocular trauma. The ocular effects of trauma can be far-reaching, so timely intervention is of prime importance to improve the visual outcome. General Objective: To evaluate the visual outcome after ocular injury. Methods: This study was conducted at Nagri Eye Hospital, Ahmadabad. In total, 68 eyes of 68 patients with eye injury were included in this study. Detail history was taken from the entire patient and a detailed ocular examination was done. Results: The mean age of incidence of the patients was 25.39 ± 16.89. The commonest age group presented with ocular trauma was <10 yrs followed by the 2nd decade, i.e., 11 - 20 yrs. A great majority of patients were male with the mean age of 25.89 ± 16.55 accounting for 83.82%. The majority of the patients have visited the hospital in between the time period of 24 hrs - 1 wk (57.35%), followed by 23.52% within the time period of <24 hrs. The majority of the patients got their eyes traumatized during industrial work (27.94%) followed by domestic work (26.47%). 19.11% of patients have got the trauma during agricultural activity. The commonest type of ocular trauma was with wooden material (19) followed by metallic (13). The blunt types of trauma were most frequent accounting for 42.64% followed by combined blunt and perforating 32.35%. A comparative study of visual recovery was also done between the presenting visual acuity and the final visual outcome after 3 months by using paired t-test, which showed marked visual improvement from 1st visit to the final visit (p-value < 0.005). Conclusions: The majority of cases were youth males with the age group of 25 yrs. All the cases with ocular trauma were unilateral. The trauma was common in industrial workers with the majority of the cases of blunt type. There was satisfactory visual improvement in patients who followed-up well.