AIM:To determine the prevalence of screening myopia and refractive correction among primary and middle school students aged from 6-18 years in Xuzhou city, Jiangsu Province.

METHODS: A cross-sectional cluster sampling study was designed. The total number of screened students was 63 488 in 70 schools from Xuzhou city in this study from September 2020 to December 2020. After excluding the unqualified data, 58 149 students aged 6-18 years were included to analyse. The prevalence of screening myopia, refractive correction and full correction with the aspect of different ages, genders, regions and degrees of myopia were described.

RESULTS: The overall rate of screening myopia and refractive correction were 49.26% and 31.11%, respectively and both showed an increasing trend with age(P<0.01). Additionally, the degree of myopia also gradually deepened with age. For the two rates, there appeared to be higher for girls than boys(53.70% vs 45.67% for screening myopia and 32.45% vs 29.84% for refractive correction, all P<0.01). However, girls showed a lower rate than boys for full refractive correction(56.60% vs 63.98%, P<0.01), which was 60.23% totally among all the myopic students with refractive correction. The corrective and full refractive correction rate of urban primary and secondary school students are higher than that of townships(46.50% vs 18.33%,62.20% vs 56.07%, all P<0.01).

CONCLUSION:The prevalence of screening myopia among primary and middle school students was not optimistic in Xuzhou city in 2020. The rates of refractive correction and full correction were relatively low among myopic students, possibly because of the progression of myopia.