Quantifying the impact of cataract on the vision-related quality of life of Marfan patients using the 'Visual Function Questionnaire' (VFQ-25)

Session Details

Session Title: Ocular Pathologies

Session Date/Time: Tuesday 08/09/2015 | 16:30-18:00

Paper Time: 17:40

Venue: Room 1

First Author: : M.Poelzl GERMANY

Co Author(s): :    T. Herbst   J. Foerster   D. Holland              

Abstract Details

Purpose:

Besides symptoms of the skeletal system (extreme body growth, hyper elasticity of the joints, muscle atrophy) and heart and vascular diseases (mitral valvular disease, aortic dissection), Marfan patients suffer from eye diseases like luxation of the lens, cataract, glaucoma and retinal detachment. The study wants to quantify the influence of different eye diseases on the quality of life of Marfan patients using the “Visual function Questionnaire” (VFQ-25).

Setting:

The “Visual Function Questionnaire” (VFQ-25) was used to quantify the vision-related quality of life. 254 patients from five different European countries completed the questionnaire. Patients were members of the local Marfan syndrome self-help group. Sub samples were built for different criteria like state of origin, gender and different ocular diseases.

Methods:

Transformations of answers into quality scores occurred according to Mangione (2000). Answers of 25 questions were first transformed into quality scores and subsumed as 12 sub-scales scores. Finally, the average of the twelve sub-scale scores gave the overall composite score, which ranged between 0 (lowest score) and 100 (highest score). χ2 test or the Mann-Whitney U-test were used to identify significant differences between subgroups.

Results:

Among several results, we found significant differences between Marfan patients without ocular diseases (84.1) and Marfan patients suffering under cataract (78.9; p=0.015), under lens luxation (69.84; p<0.01), under retinal diseases (74.5; p<0.01) and under glaucoma (69.3; p=0.02). No significant differences were identified for gender as well as for origin of state.

Conclusions:

In order to quantify the vision-related quality of life of Marfan patients and to identify significant differences between subsamples, we analyzed 255 completed “Visual Function Questionnaires” (VFQ-25) of five different European countries. We found significant differences between Marfan patients without ocular diseases and Marfan patients suffering under cataract, lens luxation, glaucoma and retinal diseases. Further results for different subsamples will be presented.

Financial Interest:

NONE