Abstract
Purpose: :
The province of Ontario (population 13 million) has one centralized eye bank in Toronto that collects data on pre, intra and postoperative factors important in cornea procedures allowing for population based assessments of risk factors and outcomes related to these procedures. The purpose of this study was to determine risk factors for DSAEK failures in a longitudinal population cohort.
Methods: :
A longitudinal cohort study was undertaken from 2002-2008 and all DSAEK procedures performed in the province were included (N=424). DSAEK failure was defined as end stage flap repositioning, cornea edema or reoperation. Risk factors studied included both recipient (gender, age, diagnosis) and donor (gender, age, mean cell count, cell variance, hours cooled, time to enucleation, time to processing) factors.
Results: :
Although some variables differed between successful and failed cases, the only significant risk factor for failure was time to processing (21.0 hours in failures and 18.9 hours in successes; p=0.03).
Conclusions: :
Time to processing was an important eye bank variable in predicting DSAEK failures in this population based study.
Keywords: cornea: clinical science • clinical (human) or epidemiologic studies: risk factor assessment • clinical (human) or epidemiologic studies: outcomes/complications