Prevalence of congenital optic disc pits in adult Chinese: The Beijing Eye Study.

PURPOSE: To determine the prevalence of optic disc pits in the elderly Chinese population. METHODS. The Beijing Eye Study, a population-based, cross-sectional cohort study, included 4439 subjects out of 5324 subjects invited to participate (response rate 83.4%) with an age of 40+ years. The present study included 4027 (90.7%) subjects for whom readable optic disc photographs were available.

RESULTS

A pit of the optic nerve head was detected in one (0.02%) patient. Prevalence was 0.02 +/-1.58% (95% confidence interval: -0.02, 0.07).

CONCLUSIONS

A congenital optic disc pit was found in one subject of the present population-based study in mainland China. In a mathematical sense, the calculated prevalence of optic disc pits in the whole population would be 0.02 +/- 1.58% (95% confidence interval: -0.02, 0.07) or about 1:4.000 subjects. From a statistical point of view, however, population-based studies with about 10,000 subjects are necessary to confirm this finding.