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 News
Release
Children's
lives improve along with their eyes after strabismus surgery, UM SPH researchers
find.
January 20,
2004 press release from the University
of Michigan School of Public Health.
ANN ARBOR, Mich.—People call
it lazy eye, wall eye, wandering and even shifting eyes. Such negative
connotations for strabismus, a common condition affecting eye alignment,
intrigued a team of University of Michigan researchers. They decided to
study how children and their parents might assess non-clinical changes--in
social settings, for example--that may take place after surgery to correct
alignment of the children's eyes.
In 2003, the study called "Quality of Life Improvements Following
Childhood Strabismus Surgery" was completed by researchers Patricia
Wren of the UM School of Public Health (UM SPH) Department of Health
Behavior and Health Education, David
Musch of the UM SPH Department of Epidemiology and UM Ophthalmology
& Visual Sciences, and Steven Archer of UM Ophthalmology & Visual
Sciences.
Wren and Musch had worked with
ophthalmologists and physicians in the past to collect quality-of-life
and other psychosocial measures as an adjunct to standard clinical data.
Findings from this 2003 study of 98 pre-teen patients indicate that "substantial
and statistically significant improvements were observed in social, emotional,
and functional measures" after the eye alignment surgeries, all of
which were conducted at University of Michigan Kellogg Eye Center. The
patients were first seen over an 18-month period from February 2000 through
August 2001.
Wren and colleagues hope this pilot study will help garner support from
the National Eye Institute for a larger project, in which they plan to
expand the demographics of the patients with strabismus--a condition that
affects roughly 2 out of 100 children. She says her work, which relies
on pre- and post-operative interviews, builds upon the ongoing "Functional
Outcomes Project" promoted by the American Academy of Pediatrics
to more completely assess the impact of medical treatment on the lives
of children and their families.
"I've always been in interested in patient outcomes," Wren explains.
"And I don't think we pay enough to the quality of life of children.
"We need to learn at what age children can answer for themselves,"
Wren believes. She says that the asthma research community centered at
the University of Michigan School of Public Health is "leading the
charge in wanting to make improvements in child health from the child's
perspective." These improvements center on such issues as anxiety,
depression, social relations, and a child's sense of positive well-being.
"The ophthalmology research
community has some catching up to do," Wren says. And that's a condition
she hopes to change.
Contact: Mary
Beth Lewis, Office of Communications
Phone: (734) 615-2279
E-mail: lewismb@umich.edu
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