Chennai: At a conclave organised by FICCI and Vision 2020, experts deliberated on the challenges faced by patients suffering from eye diseases, due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Almost 35 per cent of India’s elderly population is living with some form of visual impairment, they said and added that majority suffer from eye ailments such as cataract, glaucoma or retinal diseases, that could lead to blindness, if not diagnosed or treated in time.
One of the key reasons of blindness is retinal diseases like Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD) among elderly and Diabetes Macular Edema (DME) in patients suffering from diabetes. A diabetic patient is 25 times more vulnerable towards the possibility of getting blind as compared to a healthy individual.
The Covid-19 lockdown has forced patients to miss their doctor appointments for almost four months, now. This could add to India’s burden of blind population, which is 4.8 million.
As per the National Blindness and Visually Impaired Survey 2019, most cases of blindness (92.9 per cent) and visual impairment (96.2 per cent) in India, are due to avoidable or preventable causes.