Systemic diseases associated with various types of retinal vein occlusion☆
Section snippets
Patients and methods
At the Ocular Vascular Clinic of the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, we prospectively investigated the prevalence of systemic disorders before or at the onset of various types of retinal vein occlusion in 1090 consecutive patients, seen between 1973 and 1990 (Table 1). There were an additional 10 patients that were excluded from the study because they did not have any systemic evaluation performed for logistic reasons.
Diagnostic criteria for the six types of retinal vein occlusion
Results
Table 1 summarizes the demographic characteristics of patients in the six types of retinal vein occlusion. Almost all patients in this study were Caucasian, consistent with the racial pattern in the population of Iowa and adjoining states.
TABLE 2, TABLE 3 include information on the prevalence of major systemic diseases (and selected subgroups) present before or at onset of retinal vein occlusion in patients with central retinal vein occlusion and branch retinal vein occlusion, respectively.
Discussion
It is beyond the scope of this article to review and discuss the voluminous, often contradictory, literature on the subject of systemic diseases associated with the various types of retinal vein occlusion. We would like to comment briefly on some pertinent issues and compare our findings with those of some larger series reported in the literature.
In the present study, we investigated the prevalence of systemic diseases in 1090 consecutive patients with various types of retinal vein occlusion.
Conclusion
Our study revealed that a variety of systemic disorders may be present in association with six types of retinal vein occlusion and in different age groups, and that their prevalence differs significantly, so that the common practice of generalization about these disorders, covering the entire range of patients with retinal vein occlusion, can be misleading. The presence of a particular associated systemic disorder does not necessarily mean cause-and-effect relationship with that type of retinal
Supplementary data
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Cynthia R. Long, PhD, for her valuable help in the statistical data analysis of this study.
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This work is supported by Grant EY-1151 and RR-59 from the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, and in part by unrestricted grants from Research to Prevent Blindness, Inc, New York, New York, and from Alcon Research Institute, Fort Worth, Texas.
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Dr Hayreh is a Research to Prevent Blindness Senior Scientific Investigator.