Increased Risk of Glaucoma in Patients with Sjögren’s Syndrome: A Nationwide Population-Based Cohort Study

ABSTRACT

Purpose

The risk of glaucoma in patients suffering from Sjögren’s syndrome has not been elucidated. We aimed for evaluating the absolute incidence as well as the relative risk of glaucoma in patients with SS at the level of the whole country population.

Methods

We conducted a retrospective cohort study using a national health insurance database in Taiwan from 2000 to 2013. We used International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, to categorise medical conditions for study group and comparison group. We used Cox proportional hazard regression analysis to determine adjusted hazard ratios (aHRs) of glaucoma between study and comparison group after adjusting for sex, age, and comorbidities.

Results

Among 17,398 patients with primary Sjögren’s syndrome, 133 patients were diagnosis with glaucoma during follow-up. Of the 69,592 non-primary Sjögren’s syndrome patients, 429 patients developed glaucoma. Glaucoma risk was elevated in patients with primary Sjögren’s syndrome than in the non-Sjögren’s syndrome group (adjusted hazard ratio [HR] 2.274, 95% in the confidence interval [95% CI] 1.847–2.800; P < .001).

Conclusions

The risk of glaucoma among the population having Sjögren’s syndrome was higher than those did not have Sjögren’s syndrome. It indicated the necessity of regular examination for glaucoma in patients with Sjögren’s syndrome.

KEYWORDS:

• Cohort study
• glaucoma
• national health insurance research database
• risk factors
• Sjögren’s syndrome

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09286586.2023.2213766

Additional information

Funding

The study was funded by the National Defense Medical Center and Tri Service General Hospital (TSGH-B-111018, TSGH-B-112020). The sponsors have no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.