Abstract
Purpose: :
To determine whether IOP-lowering medications reduce the risk of retinal arterial occlusions or retinal venous occlusions.
Methods: :
A retrospective case-control study evaluated patients with central retinal arterial occlusion (CRAO), branch retinal arterial occlusion (BRAO), central retinal venous occlusion (CRVO), or branch retinal venous occlusion (BRVO) and their matched controls. Conditional logistic regression models (based on matched variables) were used to predict the likelihood of each outcome while adjusting for the following covariates: treatment with IOP10 lowering medication in the year prior to index date (incrementally defined as 2 to 10 prescriptions), descriptives and comorbidities in the year prior to indexdate.
Results: :
In univariate analysis, CRVO, BRVO, and CRAO patients had fewer IOP lowering prescriptions in the year prior to index date than matched controls (not significant). After adjusting for covariates, CRVO and BRVO patients treated with IOP-lowering medications in the year prior to index date were less likely to develop ocular ischemic events. As the number of prescriptions used to define the treatment cutoff increased, so did the protective effects of the OR. In other words, the more IOP-lowering prescriptions a patient received, the less likely he was to experience a retinal venous occlusion. This trend was significant for both CRVO (P<0.0001) and BRVO (P=0.0110) patients. However, a similar trend was not observed in the CRAO and BRAO patients.
Conclusions: :
Results of our study suggest that IOP-lowering medication is associated with a possible protective effect against retinal venous occlusions.
Keywords: drug toxicity/drug effects • clinical (human) or epidemiologic studies: treatment/prevention assessment/controlled clinical trials