Corneal And Refractive Properties And Correlation To Clinical Measures In Patients With Congenital Nystagmus Syndrome

To describe the corneal and refractive findings and explore the correlations between refractive findings to visual acuity and other clinical measures in patients with congenital nystagmus syndrome compared to healthy subjects.

Private Ophthalmology clinic

In this comparative cross-sectional observational study, a scheimpflug imaging tomography was conducted on eyes of congenital nystagmus syndrome patients and compared with those of healthy individuals (control group). 212 eyes of 126 congenital nystagmus syndrome patients and 212 eyes of 106 healthy individuals were included in the study. Corneal astigmatism prevalence, corneal astigmatic power, maximal keratometry, mean keratometry and pachymetry values were obtained and compared between the groups. Correlations between the different variables were examined.

All nystagmus patients (100%) had astigmatism of at least 1 diopter compared to 11 subjects (34.375%) in the control group (P<0.001). The average astigmatic power in the patient’s group was 3.383 ± 1.135 diopters compared to 0.8281 ± 0.58.54 diopters in the control group (P<0.001). 53%, 36%, 11% of nystagmus group had hyperopic astigmatism, myopic astigmatism and astigmatism only, respectively. The maximal keratometric power in the patient’s group was 44.16 ± 2.444 diopters compared to 42.88 ± 2.052 diopters in the control group (P=0.027). Pearson correlation demonstrated a moderate-to-strong negative association between VA and corneal astigmatism grade (r = -0.658 p < 0.001).

All patients with congenital nystagmus syndrome have visually significant astigmatism. The higher corneal astigmatism garde the lower is the visual acuity.