Prevalence of Color Vision Deficiency among Medical Students in KFU- SA (2014 ? 2015)

Red-green color deficiency is a disability in which a person cannot distinguish between red from green, and its one of the diseases that occur mostly in males since it is an X-linked disorder, although it can also occur in females. It can be acquired due to many vision problems. This cross-sectional study was conducted to determine the prevalence of color deficiency among medical students in King Faisal University (KFU) by using questionnaires and Ishihara charts. The study showed that the prevalence of color vision deficiency among medical students was 2.7 % (n=9) among the study sample (5 out of 194 females (2.57 %) and 4 out of 129 males (3.1 %) were found to have red-green color vision deficiency (CVD). Among the students who had CVD there were 2 of them had other vision problems, and the remaining 7 were not suffering from any vision problems. In addition, 22.2 % of them had a family history of CVD and 77.78 % did not had. Chi-square test (P value=0.36) shows that there is no significant relationship between color vision deficiency and having family history of this disorder. The study proved that the CVD among medical students in KFU is noticeable. Since this disorder can affect their performance in the future, they should be made aware of their condition and be guided to consider this problem while practicing their jobs. Based on these, findings it is recommended that further studies are needed using a bigger sample size using the same population to confirm or refuse the initial findings from this study.