This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
Long-term statins may protect against glaucoma, study suggests
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Long-term use of statins and other cholesterol-lowering medications may reduce the risk of developing open-angle glaucoma, a review of medical records suggests.
Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and other institutions found “a significant and meaningful association between glaucoma and long-term statin use” in an examination of Veterans Administration clinical databases. Gerald McGwin, Jr., MS, PhD, and colleagues describe their findings in the June issue of Archives of Ophthalmology.
“If the trend and the magnitude of effect seen with statin use of greater than 23 months is upheld with larger sample sizes in future studies, the protective effect will rival that of lowering intraocular pressure through the use of medications discussed in the Ocular Hypertension Treatment Study and of other treatments discussed in other studies,” the authors said in the study. “This would also imply that a new therapeutic class of agents might be effective for the care and treatment of patients with glaucoma.”
Dr. McGwin and colleagues reviewed the prescription and medical files of patients who were treated at the Birmingham Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center for various medical conditions and determined whether patients were taking statin drugs, including atorvastatin calcium, cervastatin sodium, fluvastatin sodium, pravastatin sodium, simvastatin or lovastatin. Use of nonstatin lipid-lowering agents was also evaluated.
Only patients aged 50 years and older were included in the study. Women were excluded because there were too few to provide meaningful data analysis. The glaucoma patients were compared against a control group of age-matched patients created by randomly selecting patients who did not develop glaucoma by the end of the observation period.
A total of 667 glaucoma cases were identified. Of these, 170 cases had a diagnosis of open-angle glaucoma, 31 were diagnosed with other specified forms of glaucoma and 466 had unspecified forms of glaucoma.
According to the study authors, patients with glaucoma were more likely to have filled a statin prescription, and a protective association was noted. However, after adjusting for diabetes, lipid metabolism disorders, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, cerebrovascular disease and arterial disease, this protective association was not statistically significant.
The authors noted that there was a significant trend for a decreasing risk for developing glaucoma with longer-term use of statins (P = .04), particularly among patients who used the drugs for 23 months or longer.
Use of nonstatin lipid-lowering medications was also associated with a reduced glaucoma risk. Considering the combined effect of both statin and nonstatin medications, the largest risk reduction was associated with use of both classes of drugs, followed by use of nonstatins only, and then by statins only. However, the authors noted that none of these associations were statistically significant.