Abstract
Purpose :
To assess the prevalence of depression according to the severity of glaucoma and the relationship between level of compliance to glaucoma medical treatment and the severity of depression in glaucoma patients
Methods :
Cross-sectional study. Patients with glaucoma diagnosis completed 2 questionaries. The first one, The Beck depression inventory II, was previously validated and translated for its application in mexican population. The second one, applied for evaluating compliance, was the Morisky-green test. Then we reviewed the expedients to assess the glaucoma severity according to the Hoddap Parish clasification. Fisher’s exact test was performed to compare the proportion of patients within each level of depression across all levels of glaucoma severity. A multinomial logistic regression model was fit to assess the relationship between level of compliance and the presence of depression (levels 2 to 4) as compared to depression level 1
Results :
113 patients were analyzed, 51.33% of patients reported symptoms of depression. Out of all the patients classified as having moderate depression, 23.08% had moderate glaucoma, 53.85% had severe and 15.38% had one eye with visual acuity of no light perception due to glaucoma. Fisher’s exact test revealed a statistically significant association between glaucoma severity and severity of depression (p<0.0001). Patients who reported symptoms of depression had an OR of 54.47 (p=0.0002) for poor compliance (as compared to good compliance) and an OR of 6.26 (p=0001) for medium compliance (as compared to good compliance)
Conclusions :
The diagnosis and severity of glaucoma have a linear relation with depression and its severity. There is also a clear relation between depression and compliance, which might lead to a vicious cycle in this kind of patients. We believe that the integration of a multidiscipilanry team with psychiatrists and psychologists might improve the prognosis of patients with glaucoma
This abstract was presented at the 2019 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Vancouver, Canada, April 28 - May 2, 2019.