Abstract
Purpose :
To evaluate the risk of stroke following ranibizumab treatment for neovascular age-related macular degeneration (AMD).
Methods :
National registry data were used, comprising 1,025,340 random subjects in 2002. The ranibizumab group was composed of patients diagnosed with neovascular AMD and treated with ranibizumab between 2009 and 2013 (n=467). The two types of comparison groups were defined as comorbidity-matched controls (n=2,330) comprised of randomly selected patients (five per AMD patient), who were matched to the ranibizumab group according to sociodemographic factors, hypertension, atrial fibrillation, and the Charlson comorbidities index, and sociodemographic-matched controls (n=2,248) comprised according to sociodemographic factors only. Each sampled patient was tracked until 2013. The Cox proportional hazard regression was used
Results :
Strokes occurred in 6.6% of the ranibizumab group versus 7.0% of the comorbidity-matched controls and 6.7% of the sociodemographic-matched controls; these differences were not statistically significant. The overall incidence of stroke was similar for the ranibizumab group versus the comorbidity-matched controls and sociodemographic-matched controls, based on the multivariable Cox regression (hazard ratio [HR] =0.88; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.60–1.30; HR=0.95, 95% CI, 0.65–1.41, respectively).
Conclusions :
Ranibizumab treatment for neovascular AMD did not increase the overall risk of stroke, compared with comorbidity-matched controls or sociodemographic-matched controls.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2016 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Seattle, Wash., May 1-5, 2016.