Quality Of Life And Tomography Indices In Keratoconus Patients

Keratoconus is a corneal ectasia that leads to a thinning and steepening of corneal surface, which impairs visual acuity and quality of life. In this study, we aimed to assess the relation between quality of life and corneal tomography indices, irrespective of visual acuity.

Cross sectional study conducted at the University of Jordan hospital on keratoconus patients

We reviewed tomography images of keratoconus patients who visited the clinic from August 2021 to January 2022 and were diagnosed as keratoconus. Among screened participants, we included patients with best seeing eyes with keratoconus where best corrected visual acuity was better than 0.5 with no previous corneal transplantation.

We translated and validated the Keratoconus Outcomes Research Questionnaire (KORQ) into Arabic language. Upon performing a reliability analysis, the 18-item activity limitation questions had good validity with Cronbach’s alpha of 0.848, and the 11-item symptoms questions had also good validity with Cronbach’s alpha of 0.804.

A total of 69 patients were eventually included in this study, with a mean age of 34.0 (±11.50) years. They were 43 (62.3%) men and 26 (37.7%) women. We performed a linear regression analysis to analyze the predictors for visual activity score and symptom score. The only predictor for visual function score was gender (p= 0.006; B value of 11.64 with 95% CI: 3.50 to 19.78), and none of the tomography indices were related to quality of life.

We concluded that the quality of life in  keratoconus patients is not related to specific tomography indices. Moreover, we found that the quality of life of men are generally more affected by keratoconus compared to women. We also provided a validated Arabic version of the KORQ questionnaire.