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Abbreviations
QOL, quality of life; SE, strabismic eye
Editorial
A Pubmed search combining “Quality of life” and “Strabismus” retrieved more than one hundred papers between the years 2004 and 2014. A comprehensive review was published by McBain et al.1 in Survey of Ophthalmology early this year. Quality of life (QoL) is a relatively “new” concept in strabismus lingo. What is Quality of Life? We can define QoL as “General well being, defined in health and happiness rather than wealth”. QoL is now recognized as an important measure in health care. QoL is a complex concept with variation between individuals with the same illness and within an individual over time. My interest in this topic comes from my current practice, where I see many adult patients with long-standing strabismus, some of them with deep amblyopia, some of them with no vision or light perception in the strabismic eye. Many of them didn’t have surgery during childhood or teenage years, but 20, 30, or 40 years later they want their eyes straight. Why now? The answer: because now they can. The main reason for not having surgery before is because treatment was not available to them in their natal countries. Several patients are from Nepal or Somalia. In other cases families couldn’t afford surgery and social security was unavailable. A third group are patients whose parents weren’t interested in a “cosmetic” treatment or because of fear of surgery. Last, some of them didn’t have surgery because their doctors advised them against, “it’s a blind eye, no need for surgery” “not a medical necessity”. Is it cosmetic? Cosmetic treatment is the change of a normal situation to a different but still normal one. A restorative treatment is the change of an abnormal anatomic state to a normal or less abnormal one. We all have seen the teenage girl with her hair covering the strabismic eye, or the constant head posture to look as orthotropic as possible. A quality of life questionnaire has been developed for adults with strabismus and has the advantage of assessing the distress caused by strabismus. Appearance has a great influence on psychosocial functioning. Ocular misalignment has considerable impact on QoL.
Acknowledgments
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Conflicts of interest
Authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
References
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