Results of quantitative and qualitative assessment of colour vision in children with amblyopia

Background. A study of colour vision in patients with various ophthalmopathologies is one of the urgent tasks of modern ophthalmology. Only a small number of publications are devoted to results of the study of colour vision in children with amblyopia. This may be due to disadvantages of the currently existing methods of diagnosing colour vision, most of which are designed mainly for diagnosing colour vision in adults and teenagers or require complex equipment.

Purpose: to study possibilities of using the developed own method of quantitative and qualitative assessment of colour vision in children with amblyopia.

Material and methods. 81 school-age children were observed from the beginning of September 2021 to the beginning of June 2022. According to the results of standard ophthalmological examination they were divided into two groups: 1) 35 children (70 eyes) in the group with amblyopia, 2) 46 children (92 eyes) in the control group with normal visual acuity. The classic Farnsworth–Munsell Dichotomous D-15 test and our developed method of quantitative and qualitative assessment of colour vision were used to study colour vision in all children.

Results. In the group of children with amblyopia, only 28.6% children with amblyopia in the study of the best-seeing eye and 14.3% in the study of the worst-seeing eye were able to perceive all colour tones correctly. Unlike in the control group, at least half of the children successfully coped with determining all the using colour tones testing each eye. Quantitative assessment of colour vision conducted using our developed method in the children with amblyopia showed significantly higher average values of the total error of perception of colour tones for the best-seeing eye (M = 15.4 ± 2.1°) compared with the worst-seeing eye (M = 30.5 ± 3.3°) and significantly higher (p < 0.05) similar values compared to the children in the control group. The severity of colour vision disorders in the children with amblyopia has a significant direct dependence on the duration of the disease and a significant inverse dependence on visual acuity (r = –0.47, p < 0.001). Most often, colour vision disorders detected in the children in the control group relate to the perception of red, green and blue color tones when examining both eyes. In the children with amblyopia the perception of green and blue tones is more often detected when examining the best-seeing eye and the perception of red, green, blue and purple tones is detected when examining the worst-seeing eye.

Conclusion. Our developed method makes possible to effectively carry out quantitative and qualitative assessment of colour vision in children with amblyopia.

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