ArticleBMJ open2025
Functional vision tests as clinical trial outcome measures in ophthalmology: a scoping review.
Article in BMJ open, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Visualising treatment effects in low-vision settings: proven and potential endpoints for clinical trials of inherited retinal disease therapies.Gene therapy · 2026Review
- Feasibility, agreement, and time savings of PHANTOM open-field binocular integrated refraction versus conventional clinical refraction in healthy young adults.BMC ophthalmology · 2026Article
- Treatment allocation in ophthalmological randomised-control trials (TAO-RCT): A cross-sectional meta-research study.Eye (London, England) · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectivesTo identify currently available functional vision tests and evaluate their use as clinical trial outcome measures in ophthalmology.
designScoping review using the PRISMA-ScR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis Extension for Scoping Reviews) guidelines.
methodsA literature search was conducted in MEDLINE and Embase (via Ovid) for articles published between 1 January 2003 and 1 August 2024. Additional grey literature was sourced from institutional repositories, conference proceedings and a manual citation search. Article screening was conducted against a predefined inclusion criteria by two independent, masked reviewers, with a third reviewer acting as arbiter. The inclusion criteria were English language articles which feature a test assessing functional vision in patients with an ophthalmological disease. Details of source characteristics, test methodology and accessibility and evidence of test validation were collected.
resultsOf 2665 articles returned by the search, 73 were included and 45 unique tests of functional vision were identified. Diseases affecting the peripheral retina were mainly affected, accounting for 77% (56 out of 73) of the diseases featured in all included studies. Overall, 82% (37 out of 45) functional vision tests reported evidence of statistical validation with varying robustness. Functional vision tests were mapped to domains of orientation and mobility, facial recognition, observer-rated task performance, visual search and driving. Obstacle courses assess vision-guided orientation and mobility, correlate highly with clinical measures of visual function in severe peripheral retinal disease and have been validated for use in clinical trials. Their requirement of physical space and time limits utility in multicentre trials; equivalent tests leveraging virtual reality and eye tracking technologies are in development. Early iterations of visual search tests to simulated realistic scenes have demonstrated discriminative ability, even in paediatric patients.
conclusionsFunctional vision tests can facilitate research into future novel ophthalmological treatments that prioritise patients in terms of how clinical benefit is defined. The principal barriers to the uptake of these tests are lack of accessibility, low quality validation and that many tests remain early in their development stage. This review captures the current landscape of functional vision tests and serves as a reference for investigators and regulatory bodies to evaluate the suitability of these tests for ophthalmic clinical trials.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.