Abstract
Background and AimThe clinical association between dry eye syndrome (DES) and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) remain unclear with less evidences. We aimed to investigate the relationship between CFS and DES using a national insurance and prospective cohort study.MethodsData from the Longitudinal Health Insurance Database 2000 was applied to estimate the incidence of CFS among patients with DES, and their age- and sex-matched controls without DES over a long-term follow-up period. All participants were CFS free at baseline, before the interval (2005–2007), but were later diagnosed with CFS. DES patients and its relative matched controls were excluded prevalent CFS before the same interval.ResultsWe identified 884 patients with DES and 3,536 matched controls in baseline and estimated the hazard ratios for incident CFS in the follow-up period. Patients with DES had a 2.08-fold considerably increasing risk of developing CFS, compared to non-DES group. An elevated risk of developing CFS remained (1.61-fold risk) even after adjusting for age, sex, and comorbidities. There was a presence of increasing risk in DES-related CFS when CFS-related comorbidities existing (adjusted hazard ratio, 1.98, 95% confidence interval, 1.19–3.29; p < 0.01). The subsequent risk for CFS between DES and non-DES patients was significant increased with three or more annual medical visits, the adjusted risk for CFS was 4.88-fold risk (95% CI, 2.26–10.58, p < 0.001).ConclusionWe recommended that physicians should be aware of the increased risk of CFS among DES patients and adequately assess the health impacts among these patients.
Highlights
Little is known about the risk factors influencing chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) following dry eye syndrome (DES) [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
The basic characteristic of distribution among the variables was present that the age, gender and co-morbidities distributions
Significant differences were found for Sjögren syndrome (SS), rheumatoid arthritis (RA), depression, anxiety, sleep disturbance, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and FM between these two groups (Table 1)
Summary
Little is known about the risk factors influencing chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) following dry eye syndrome (DES) [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. A previous study has shown that most patients with DES were classified as having spectrum diseases, such as fibromyalgia (FM) [9], and that DES was related to FM, even among FM patients without comorbidities (1.40-fold risk) [9]. The recent study was shown that the SS patients were presence of dryness, pain, fatigue, even the disturbance of quality of life [12]. The clinical association between dry eye syndrome (DES) and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) remain unclear with less evidences. We aimed to investigate the relationship between CFS and DES using a national insurance and prospective cohort study
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