Evaluation of dry eye in computer users

Abstract

Background: Increased use of computers led to an increase in the number of patients complaining about ocular and non-ocular symptoms related to computer use. One of such computer associated ill-effect is, “Computer Vision Syndrome” manifesting as dry eye. This study was done to find out prevalence of dry eye.

Methods: Computer users were grouped in Group A  > 2hours to ≤ 4 hours, Group B >4 hours to ≤ 6 hours, Group C > 6 hours to ≤ 8 hours according to their exposure to computer per day. Dry eye evaluation was done with ocular surface disease index questionnaire, tear meniscus height, and tear film brake up time, schirmer test. One way analysis of variance test was used to compare mean values, find p values and ensuring statistical significance.

Results: In our study prevalence among the males and females was found to be of 25%. The prevalence of dry eye among 20 to 30 and 31 to 40 years of age is 13.04% and 51.64 % suggesting that the prevalence of dry eye increases as the years of computer exposure increases. The overall prevalence of dry eye in computer users was found to be 25% with prevalence of 9.3%, 18.18% and 45.71% in groups A, B and C respectively.

Conclusions: It seems prevalence of dry eye is increasing with increase in duration of computer use per day. OSDI together with TBUT, schirmer-1 test cab be performed easily and used to support diagnosis of dry eye.