Prevalence of Refractive Errors Among Saudi Population: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: Refractive errors are common globally with an estimated number of 2.3 billion people suffering from impaired vision secondary to uncorrected refractive errors. This study aimed to estimate a piece of proper evidence about the overall prevalenceof refractory errors within the kingdom. Methods: A process of collection of relevant key words was conducted followed by database search. All data were analyzed with R software version 4.0.2. Using a “meta” package. The event rate and the corresponding 95% confidence interval (CI) was used to assess the prevalence of refractive errors in the study. Results: The sample size was 16850 individual with the highest sample size was 5176 and the lowest one was 162. The male prevalence in our sample was 55%. All the included papers were published after 2010 and were of fair quality. Eleven studies of 12,121 individuals reported the overall prevalence of different refrative erros. The pooled overall prevalnce rate was 27.28% (95% CI= 18.29-40.69) (Figure 2A); ranging from 4.55% to 72.20% among individual studies. This wide range of the reported prevalence rates was evident with a significant heterogenity among the included studies (I2= 99%; P-value< 0.001). Conclusion: A huge part of the high rates might be attributable to medical students. Moreover, myopia was the most common refractive error followed by astigmatism and hyperopia.