Background: Present trends in medical care suggest that primary care physicians will exert increasing control over patient access to medical specialty consultation and diagnostic testing. Therefore, it is important to determine whether primary care physicians can reliably identify papilledema.
Methods: A prospective study involving 429 physicians was undertaken to assess the accuracy of papilledema and pseudopapilledema detection by five groups of physicians, family practice physicians, neurologists, neuro-ophthalmologists, neurosurgeons, and ophthalmologists.
Results: Neuro-ophthalmologists and ophthalmologists did better than family physicians, neurologists, and neurosurgeons in identifying both papilledema and pseudopapilledema (P less than .05). Neuro-ophthalmologists more accurately identified pseudopapilledema than all other groups in the study (P less than .05). Family physicians did as well as, or better than, neurologists and neurosurgeons in identifying all classifications of acute and chronic papilledema defined in the study. Family physicians did not perform as well as the other four groups in differentiating pseudopapilledema from papilledema (P less than .05).
Conclusions: Although the sensitivity of detecting papilledema was high (84.5%) for family physicians, the specificity was low (59.3%). Preliminary data indicate that family physicians with prior exposure to clinical ophthalmology in medical school did better than those who had not had training. It is possible that additional exposure to clinical ophthalmology during residency training might yield improved performance.