The prevalence of clinically significant myopia varied markedly with ethnicity in school children sampled from a semi-rural region of mainland China (Han > Hui > Uyghur). As reported previously, uncorrected/under-corrected refractive error was the main cause of presenting visual impairment.

Background Stroke, a common cerebrovascular accident, usually results in various extents of functional disability. Extensive studies have shown that ocular and visual problems are common in patients with stroke. Unfortunately, current stroke rehabilitation programs rarely address stroke‐related ocular and visual problems in Hong Kong. Methods To examine how visual impairment (for example, deterioration in visual acuity and restriction in visual field) affects the stroke population in Hong Kong, vision screening was conducted for post‐stroke patients attending in‐patient and out‐patient stroke clinics at two hospitals. Results One hundred and thirteen stroke patients were recruited. The percentage of various aspects of visual problems in Hong Kong post‐stroke patients was generally lower than that reported in Western countries; however, a high percentage of patients had deficits in oculomotor (53.1 per cent) and vergence functions (11.5 per cent), restrictions in binocular visual field (11.5 per cent) and impairment in visual acuity (worse than 0.30 logMAR, 29.8 per cent). Conversely, only a small proportion of patients noticed problems with their vision (for example, diplopia and blurry vision) through subjective reports. This revealed that many post‐stroke patients had undetected or undiagnosed ocular and visual problems. Appropriate referral was given to patients with visual problems for further evaluation and treatment. Conclusion Neglecting visual problems may impose deteriorating effect on patients' stroke rehabilitation and functional independence and lead to increased incidents of injury. To address this potential hindrance in rehabilitation, formal screening for visual problems in stroke patients in a rehabilitation setting is essential.

Despite poorer performance in PPA tests, the incidence of prospective falls in a Hong Kong Chinese population was low. In consequence, the PPA could not discriminate well between fallers and non-fallers. The present study provided normality data for short-form PPA measures for older Chinese people as a reference for further studies.

People with visual impairment may experience difficulties in daily activities. Studies have shown an improvement in visual functions after a short period of visual deprivation. However, little is known on scene perception and its relationship with object recognition in low vision. In this study we examined the performances of object recognition and scene categorization using photographs of real-world scenes in twenty-four young adults with normal vision before, immediately after, and 2 hours after simulated low vision. Participants were randomly assigned to either mild or moderate simulated low vision groups. For each viewing condition, participants were required to 1) annotate the objects of interests in the photos; 2) label the annotated objects; and 3) report the theme of the scenes. Results showed that with simulated visual impairment, overall performances in object recognition, object annotation, and scene perception significantly deteriorated, although the levels of deterioration among tasks were different. After 2-hour adaptation, only the accuracy of object annotation improved significantly. Our study suggests some forms of compensatory perceptual changes in visual pathway after short-term visually deprived adaption. However, this adaptation effect might be more specific to localized object recognition rather than global perception of the scene.