Abstract

A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 2024 randomly selected adults in East Delhi district using WHO-MDS brief questionnaire. All the interviewed adults subsequently underwent clinical eye examination to identify any visual disability as per NPCB&VI criteria. The objective of the study was to find out sensitivity and specificity of WHO-MDS tool against the gold standard. The MDS provided a metric disability score for each participant ranging from 0-100, on which 40 was taken as the diagnostic cut-off for disability status. Out of 2024 adult participants who underwent eye examination, 6 (0.28%) and 34 (1.67%) were disabled as per criteria BCVA<6/60 and <6/18. The sensitivity and specificity of the MDS tool in diagnosing visual disability at the 6/60 cut-off level was 83.3% and 91.5%, 58.3% and 91.9% at the 6/18 cut-off and, 35.9% and 92.4% at the 6/12 cut-off. The overall model quality decreased as the cut-off became less stringent due to decreasing area under the ROC curve.