Relationship between Retinal Vascular Occlusions and Cognitive Dementia in a Large Cross-Sectional Cohort
Section snippets
Methods
This was a retrospective, cross-sectional study conducted in accordance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Internal Review Board (IRB) approval was obtained from the University of California San Diego Health System.
We reviewed the records of 37,208 individuals older than 65 years of age, who were evaluated by an ophthalmologist or an optometrist and who also had a medical visit to our institution between January 1, 2015, and December 31, 2020. Individuals with retinal
Results
We identified 904 individuals with and 36,304 individuals without retinal vascular occlusions. Demographics and baseline characteristics of the study cohort are shown in Table 1. Individuals with retinal vascular occlusions were older than those without (79 vs. 76 years of age, respectively; P < .001), and the proportion of females was lower in the retinal vascular occlusion group (51.0 vs. 57.2%, respectively; P < .001). There were no significant differences in race between the groups (P
Discussion
We examined the association between the retinal vascular occlusions and dementia in a retrospective cohort of individuals older than 65 years of age. We found that individuals with retinal vascular occlusions have increased odds of having dementia, in line with a recently published report.3 However, after we adjusted for age or stroke, there were no significant associations between retinal vascular occlusions and dementia.
The major strengths of our study are the large sample size and adjustment
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