Abstract
Purpose :
Retinal vein occlusion (RVO) is a common cause of loss of vision. As the retina and the brain share embryologic origin, retinal vascular occlusions may reflect the initial signs of cerebral dysfunction. As early detection of patients in risk of dementia could allow for preventive treatment, the aim of this study was to investigate RVO as an independent biomarker of incident dementia.
Methods :
In a nationwide, longitudinal cohort study, we identified 3,115,898 participants through the Danish national health registries. We included individuals above 55 years, as identified between 1 January 1998 and 31 December 2016 and followed the cohort until 31 December 2018. We excluded individuals if they had a registration of RVO, unspecified retinal vascular occlusion, or any dementia prior to entry date. We calculated incidence rate (IR) and performed a Cox regression analysis with hazard ratios (HR) and 95 % confidence intervals (CI) for RVO (exposure) as a marker of all-cause dementia, vascular dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease from a crude model and a model adjusted for age, sex, marital status and systemic comorbidity.
Results :
We identified 13,911 individuals with RVO, who were more likely to have hypertension, chronic kidney disease, and dyslipidemia compared to those unexposed with RVO (n=3,083,564, p<0.001). IR of all-cause dementia was 7.1 and 3.1 per 1000 person-years at risk (PYR) in individuals exposed to RVO (578 of 81,169 PYR) and those without RVO (104,194 of 33,212,707 PYR). In the crude and adjusted model for all-cause dementia, RVO was not associated with upcoming dementia (crude HR 1.08, 95 % CI 1.00-1.18 and adjusted HR 1.01 95 % CI 0.93-1.09). Likewise, RVO did not independently predict Alzheimer’s disease (adjusted HR 0.93, 95 % CI 0.82-1.05), nor vascular dementia (adjusted HR 1.09, 95 % CI 0.87-1.36).
Conclusions :
Individuals with RVO had no higher risk of incident all-cause dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, or vascular dementia compared to individuals not exposed with RVO in a nationwide cohort.
This abstract was presented at the 2023 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in New Orleans, LA, April 23-27, 2023.