Purpose: This study aimed to identify the quality of life of those suffering from glaucoma and epiretinal membrane who are under conservative treatment as they are in the stage that does not need surgical operation, and analyze the influential factors to be used as a supportive indicator for observing treatment and clinical courses.
Materials and methods: It was carried out with 55 patients with glaucoma who has been using more than one eye drops for over two years and 56 patients with epiretinal membrane who have regular checkups with no special treatment for it. They were asked to write NEI-VFQ-25, and each detailed item was converted into a score out of 100 and calculated, and the total score was obtained by averaging the scores of all the detailed items related to seeing except for the general health items. Their visions checked using Snellen were converted to logMAR, and their best corrected visual acuity (BCVA), intraocular pressure, and spherical equivalent were compared with each other.
For statistical analysis, SPSS independent variable t-test was applied, and in all cases, it was defined as statistically significance when p value was less than 0.05.
Results: Total of the 111 patients, 55 (49.5%) had glaucoma and 56 (50.5%) had epiretinal membrane. With regard to their average ages, the patient with glaucoma was 58.38±12.95, and the patient with epiretinal membrane was 64.73±6.3, which shows that the average age of those with epiretinal membrane was significantly older. In terms of spherical equivalent, the patients with glaucoma had a significantly great myopic change. The total score of NEI-VFQ-25 was 82.85±13.18 for the glaucoma patients and 86.68±10.83 for the epiretinal membrane patients, which showed that the score of the glaucoma patients was higher than of the epiretinal membrane patients but the difference was not statistically significant (P= 0.097). The items of Ocular pain (P=0.047), Near activities (P=0.013), Vision-related mental health (P=0.009), Vision-related role difficulties (P=0.048), Vision-related dependency (P=0.002) showed a significant difference in the glaucoma patient group compared to the epiretinal membrane patient group (P〈0.05).
Conclusions: The results of the study show that glaucoma patients who continuously apply eye drops had a lower quality of life in terms of sight than patients with epiretinal membranes who only receive check-up. Future research should include its comparison through ophthalmologic examination and in-depth contents.