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2024: There are 540 thousand strabismus children in Russia

By the end of 2024, the number of Russian children suffering from strabismus reached 540 thousand. Of these, at least 30,000 are patients of the first year of life, 500,000 are children 3-6 years old, 10,000 are children from 7 years old. Lyudmila Katargina, chief freelance children's ophthalmologist of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation, shared this statistics with Vedomosti in November 2025. She noted that the prevalence of the disease in different regions is almost the same.

According to the data provided to Vedomosti by the regional Ministry of Health, in the Saratov region from 2022 to 2024, the number of children under 17 with this diagnosis increased by 45.8% (from 14,328 to 20,893 people), and in Bashkiria - by 33.8% (from 4897 to 6553 people).

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Фото: Freepik

According to the regional Ministry of Health, the increase in recorded cases of strabismus is largely associated with improved diagnostics. So, in the Primorsky Territory from 2022 to 2024, the number of detected diseases in children increased from 124 to 232. In the Moscow region, there is an increase in new diagnoses among adolescents: from 829 in 2022 to 888 in 2024. A similar trend is observed in other regions, including the Irkutsk region and the Krasnodar Territory.

According to Lyudmila Katargina, the main causes of pathology are CNS diseases, decreased vision in one eye, uncompensated refractive abnormalities and hereditary predisposition.

Igor Aznauryan, President of the Association of Ophthalmologists of Strabismologists, notes that in regions with a developed healthcare system and high medical literacy of the population, strabismus is detected more often and at earlier stages. According to him, telemedicine consultations are used to solve the problem of the geographical difference in gaining access to the help of specialists.

Considering the training of new personnel no less urgent task, Aznauryan said that the Association of Ophthalmologists of Strabismologists has already developed a system of additional education and trained 58 specialists in this area.^[1]

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