Comparison of Trends in Risk Factors for Retinopathy of Prematurity Over 12 years in Colorado: How One Academic Medical Center Compares to Statewide Data

Abstract

Purpose : More infants are surviving who are born at the lower extremes of gestational age and birth weight. We previously investigated if this change in neonatal survival is impacting the rate of severe retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) among infants born at University of Colorado Hospital (UCH). We reported (ARVO 2017) no change in rates of severe ROP over a 12 year period in our cohort of infants born at risk for ROP. We wanted to investigate whether trends in ROP risk factors at our academic institution were representative of trends in ROP risk factors in the state of Colorado.

The purpose of our study was to expand our research and compare trends in risk factors for ROP in infants born at UCH (UCH cohort) and infants included in statewide data collected by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (Colorado cohort).

Methods : This was a retrospective cohort study comparing the gestational age, birth weight, and mortality in all infants in Colorado to those at one academic institution (UCH) between January 2006 and December 2017. All infants in the study had a gestational age less than 31 weeks or birth weight less than 1500 grams.

Results : The UCH cohort included data from 1,378 infants who met the above birth weight or gestational age criteria. The Colorado cohort included 804,883 infants, 11,138 of whom met the above criteria. We found no significant trends in gestational age (slope estimate (SE): 0.02 (0.02), p = 0.35), birth weight (1.4 (2.6), p = 0.59) (Figure 1) or mortality rates (0.03 (0.03) p = 0.37) (Figure 2) over time in the UCH cohort. Similarly, we found no significant trends in these variables over time in the Colorado cohort. The proportion of infants meeting screening criteria was also stable over time in the Colorado cohort (fluctuating between 1.27% and 1.49%).

Conclusions : There was no significant difference in trends for gestational age, birth weight or death rates in either of the two cohorts over the 12 year period.

This abstract was presented at the 2019 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Vancouver, Canada, April 28 - May 2, 2019.

 

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