NORDIC REGISTERS OF VISUALLY-IMPAIRED CHILDREN

A Nordic study group, NORDSYN, consisting of ophthalmologists from Den mark (Thomas Rosenberg), Finland (Sirkka-Liisa Rudanko), Iceland (Gudm undur Viggosson), Norway (Tor Flage, Egill Hansen, Ruth Riise) and Swe den (Kristina Tornqvist), has compiled data from registers in Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway of 2527 visually impaired children. The S wedish register was established later in 1990. Each record contains th e following information: sex, year of birth, year of registration, cla ssification of visual impairment, ocular. diagnosis, systemic diagnosi s, aetiology and evt. additional impairments. The ocular diagnoses wer e compiled into groups among which congenital malformations and neuro- ophthalmological diseases were the most dominating. A coding system fo r aetiology was developed. It was demonstrated, that prenatal factors, including genetic aetiologies, were involved in a large proportion (6 6%) of the cases. The sex distribution revealed a dominance of males c ompared to the general population at the same age. The age-specific na tional prevalences for registration of childhood blindness (WHO-defini tion: best corrected visual acuity in the best eye less than 3/60 or v isual field less than 10 degrees around fixation for the ages 0-15 yea rs) were (N/100 000): Denmark 41, Finland 15, Iceland 19 and Norway 15 . The differences were primarily presumed to be due to varying efficie ncy in registration. A coding system for additional impairments was de veloped. The proportion of visually impaired children with an addition al mobility, hearing or mental impairment was between one third and on e half of the national materials thus indicating the need for interdis ciplinary tracing of and care for the visually impaired child.