Absence of an Association between Macular Degeneration and Young-Onset Dementia.

Tung-Mei Tammy Kuang,Wei-Yun Lee,Sudha Xirasagar,Herng-Ching Lin,Nai-Wen Kuo,Yen-Fu Cheng

doi:10.3390/jpm12020291

Abstract

A few population-based studies have reported an association between prior age-related macular degeneration and senile dementia. No study has explored a possible link between prior macular degeneration and young-onset dementia (YOD). This case–control study aimed to evaluate the association of YOD with prior macular degeneration diagnosed in the 5-year period before their index date. Data for this retrospective observational study were retrieved from Taiwan’s National Health Insurance (NHI) dataset. A total of 36,577 patients with newly diagnosed YOD from January 2010 to December 2017 were identified as the study cohort, assigning their diagnosis date as their index date. Comparison patients were identified by propensity score-matching (three per case, n = 109,731 controls) from the remaining NHI beneficiaries of the period, their index date being the date of their first ambulatory care claim in the year of diagnosis of their matched YOD case. Chi-square test revealed no significant difference in the prevalence of prior macular degeneration between cases and controls (1.1% vs. 1.0%, p = 0.111). Conditional logistic regression analysis also showed an unadjusted odds ratio (OR) for prior macular degeneration of 1.098 among cases relative to controls (95% CI: 0.9797–1.232). Adjusted analysis confirmed that YOD was not associated with prior macular degeneration, adjusted odds ratio 1.098 (95% CI = 0.979–1.232). We conclude that patients with macular degeneration are not at increased risk for YOD.

Highlights

Because we used the propensity score method to match cases to controls, we found as anticipated no statistically significant differences among most of the matching variables: age (p = 0.653), sex (p = 0.925), monthly income (p = 0.913), geographic location (p = 0.981), urbanization level (p = 0.970), hyperlipidemia (21.2% vs. 21.3%, p = 0.509), diabetes
We found that individuals with prior macular degeneration showed no different risk for Young-onset dementia (YOD)
Our study focused on young-onset dementia and found no association between macular degeneration and YOD

Summary

Introduction

The prevalence of dementia in the United States is 14.4% among the elderly aged over 68 years [2]. The dementia burden continues to grow due to an ageing society worldwide [3]. Young-onset dementia (YOD) is usually defined as dementia with onset before the age of 65 years. The estimated prevalence rates of YOD in various studies are much lower, about 42–77 per 100,000 population in the 30–65 age-group, and 98–163.1 per 100,000 in the 45–64 group [4,5,6,7]. Senile dementia and YOD share many risk factors, such as age [8,9], sex [10,11], smoking [12,13,14], alcohol use [15,16,17], stroke [18,19], traumatic brain injury [14,20,21], cardiovascular diseases [22,23], diabetes mellitus [24,25], obesity [26,27], dyslipidemia [28,29], and hereditary factors [30,31]

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Discussion

Conclusion