Blindness (ICD-10-GM H54.-: Blindness and visual impairment) refers to the severe reduction of vision to levels below five or two percent (depending on the definition). Blindness may be congenital or acquired.
It must be distinguished from visual impairment, in which vision is less than 30 percent but greater than five or two percent.
According to the criteria of the World Health Organization (WHO), visual impairment is defined as visual acuity of the better eye < 0.3, blindness as visual acuity < 0.05.
The following forms of visual impairment can be distinguished:
- Blindness and profound visual impairment, binocular (ICD-10-GM H54.0), monocular (ICD-10-GM H54.4).
- Severe visual impairment, binocular (ICD-10-GM H54.1), monocular (ICD-10-GM H54.5)
- Moderate visual impairment, binocular (ICD-10-GM H54.2), monocular (ICD-10-GM H54.6)
- Mild visual impairment, binocular (ICD-10-GM H54.3).
- Unspecified visual impairment, binocular (ICD-10-GM H54.9)
Furthermore, the following forms of blindness can be distinguished:
- Absolute blindness (amaurosis, also called full blindness or rarely black cataract).
- Blindness in the sense of the law – you see (in the better eye!) Less than 1/50* or there are severe visual field defects.
* The affected person can not even read at one meter a number that a healthy person can read at 50 m
Sex ratio: males to females is balanced.
Frequency peak: the maximum incidence of/ blindness is beyond the age of 60.
The prevalence of visual impairment according to the Gutenberg Health Study (GHS; 14,687 subjects were included in the study) was 0.37% (95% confidence interval [0.28; 0.49]) (n = 55) and was higher in women (0.44%) than in men (0.31%). The prevalence of blindness was present in 0.05% [0.03; 0.11] (n = 8) of those studied. The prevalence of visual impairment from the age of 65 years was 0.79% and was three times higher than in younger age decades.
The incidence (frequency of new cases) is about 12.3 cases per 100,000 inhabitants per year.Currently there are about 145,000 blind people living in Germany.Worldwide there are about 39 million blind people.
Course and prognosis: This depends on the underlying disease. Note: The Gutenberg Health Study (GHS) showed that 54.5% of visually impaired people had more than one ophthalmic pathology (ophthalmic disease) as the cause.
