Glaucoma: Sleep Apnea May Raise Risk
Patients with sleep apnea were 1.67 times more likely to develop glaucoma than patients without apnea, according to a study that compared more than 1000 apnea patients with more than 6000 age-matched participants. The study was published in the August issue of Ophthalmology.
Ching-Chun Lin, MA, from the Graduate Institute of Biomedical Informatics, College of Medical Science and Technology, Taipei Medical University, Taiwan, and colleagues relied on data from the Taiwan Longitudinal Health Insurance Database 2000, matching 1012 apnea patients aged 40 years and older with 6072 control patients of similar age, sex, and urbanization. A patient was considered to have apnea only if there were a record of him or her undergoing a sleep study. The researchers counted a glaucoma diagnosis only if the patient were prescribed medication.
“The fact that the authors required this [evidence of diagnosis] really increases the validity of their results,” Ahmad A. Aref, MD, assistant professor of ophthalmology, University of Illinois Eye and Ear Infirmary, Chicago, told Medscape Medical News. Dr. Aref, who authored a review on glaucoma and sleep earlier this year was not involved in the current study.
“Armed now with this study, clinicians should start to question their patients about sleep apnea,” Dr. Aref said. “I would treat it like other established risk factors for glaucoma, such as having a family member with glaucoma, or having high eye pressure, or being of African-American race. I would start to think seriously about grouping sleep apnea with those more established risk factors.”
“This study gives the most evidence to date that sleep apnea is a risk factor for OAG,” Parag Gokhale, MD, from Virginia Mason Medical Center, Seattle, Washington.
In this study, participants in the OSA group had higher levels of hypertension (P < .001), diabetes (P < .001), heart disease (P < .001), hyperlipidemia (P < .001), obesity (P < .001), renal disease (P < .001), and migraine (P < .001), the researchers found. Prevalence of hypothyroidism was equal in each group.
W. Christopher Winter, MD, medical director, Martha Jefferson Hospital Sleep Medicine Center, Charlottesville, Virginia, says this study should influence sleep specialists to include eye health in the list of concerns for apnea patients.
Ophthalmology. 2013;120:1559-1564. Abstract
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