Secondary Prevention of Visual Impairment in Students with Medium Degree Myopia by Means of Physical Therapy in a Vocational School

The objective is to implement a visual impairment prevention program into a vocational school’s academic process for the risk group students and to determine its effectiveness based on the dynamics of comprehensive scoring assessment of the degree of visual pathology risk.Materials and methods. Observed were 91 students (35 boys and 56 girls). For the formative experiment purposes, a study group (SG) consisting of 10 persons (4 boys and 6 girls with a visual organ pathology who performed the designed preventive program) and a reference group (RG) consisting of 10 persons (5 boys and 5 girls with a visual organ pathology who studied under the usual program) were selected The program effectiveness was evaluated by changes in the students’ subjective evaluation of their visual comfort. The Relative Risk Index (RR) was used to perform a rough evatuation of the cause-effect relations between the acting factor and the effect appearance. The output characteristics were compared between the groups using χ2 tests (binary variables), t-tests (continuous variables), Mann-Whitney test for comparing the distribution of ordinal variables, and Wilcoxon test (related sampling).Results. The dynamics in the RG over the academic year showed an increase in the scoring assessment of the visual fatigue, which constituted 90.6 ± 10.3%. At the same time, the students in the SG demonstrated a reduced intensity and number of complaints about the visual analyzer fatigue. In the SG, the complex scoring assessment reliably decreased from 9.8 ± 0.8 to 7.2 ± 0.9 c.u. The implemented preventive program had a positive effect on the complaints: “the desire to bring the text closer to the eyes” (relative risk (RR) = 6.0, χ2 = 5.6, p