Danielescu C, Chiseliţă D
Clinica Oftalmologie, Spitalul Clinic de Urgente Sf. Spiridon, Iaşi.
Oftalmologia. 2005;49(1):36-40.
To highlight the learning effect in automated perimetry and to assess the value of the first visual field in glaucoma diagnosis.
A prospective study that included 48 patients (91 eyes)--glaucoma suspects--who performed 3 visual field tests in no more than 12 months.
32 eyes were diagnosed with intraocular hypertension and the others with POAG. An improvement (expression of the learning effect) was noted in 45.05% of eyes (in an average of 3.39 2,72 points) in the second visual field and in 37.36% of eyes (3.05 2.13 points) in the third visual field. Considering (as a hypothesis) the third visual field as gold standard, the first test had a sensitivity of 87.03% and a specificity of 89.18% in detecting visual field defects (efficiency 89,01%). The second test had a sensitivity of 92.59% and a specificity of 89.18% (efficiency 91.2%).
The learning effect was present in the first three tests, but seems to have little influence on the diagnosis of visual field defects. A possible explanation is the presence to a large extent of important visual field loss (obvious from the first test) in the included patients.
