Prevalence of Color Blindness Among Medical Students

Aim: To find out the prevalence of color blindness among medical students.

Study Design: Descriptive cross-sectional.

Place and Duration of Study: Study was conducted at Chaudry Mohammad Akram teaching and research hospital, Superior university during December 2020 to May 2021.

Methodology: All the medical students having age range between 21-25 years were included in the study. An ophthalmologist did ocular examination, after that color vision was checked by putting Ishihara plates. The score less than 12 out of 14 red-green test plates were labelled as color blind. Data was analyzed by using the SPSS version 20. Chi-square was used to find out the association of color blindness with age groups and gender. p-value less than 0.05 was considered as significant.

Results: The mean age with standard deviation of study participants was 23.27 ± 0.87 years. The prevalence of color blindness among medical students was 2% out of which 1.7% were having strong red-green deficiency while only 0.3% were with mild red-green deficiency. Majority of participants with color blindness were noted in the age group of 22 years while very few were in the other age groups of medical students but these results were non-significant. On the other hand, all the color blind was male but no association was found as the p-value was more than 0.05.

Conclusion: Current study reported that about 2% of medical students are affected by color vision deficiency. So there is a need of proper visual screening program among medical undergraduates for early detection of color blindness and counselling session for them.