Higher levels of diglycerides, triglycerides adversely associated with glaucoma
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Key takeaways:
- High levels of diglycerides and triglycerides were associated with increased risk for glaucoma.
- This suggests new targets for glaucoma prevention and therapies.
Higher levels of diglycerides and triglycerides were found to be associated with increased risk for primary open-angle glaucoma in a study.
“We suspect the elevated di- and triglyceride levels are reflective of impaired insulin signaling that transcends blood sugar levels,” study author Louis R. Pasquale, MD, told Healio. “There are many ways to reduce insulin resistance with lifestyle choices such as moderate exercise, limiting carbohydrate intake, avoiding sweetened beverages, eating more fiber, consuming healthy fats, moderating portion size and reducing stress. There are already hints that drugs involved with enhancing insulin signaling like metformin and GLP-1R agonists are associated with reduced risk of glaucoma and may be accepted forms of preventative glaucoma strategies in the future.”
Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai performed metabolite profiling of blood samples collected and stored for 10 years or more before primary open-angle glaucoma (POAG) diagnosis within the Nurses’ Health Study, Nurses’ Health Study II and Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. A total of 599 participants who developed POAG and 599 matched controls were included; 369 metabolites linked to glaucoma cases were reported.
Researchers then evaluated the relation between metabolite classes and POAG and found that diglycerides and triglycerides collectively were adversely associated with POAG. A higher proportion of cases had paracentral visual field loss vs. peripheral visual field loss.
To confirm these findings, researchers analyzed the metabolomic data of 2,238 self-reported or hospital-based POAG cases and 44,723 controls from the UK Biobank. The adverse association for diglycerides and triglycerides was confirmed.
“Overall, these results provide new insights into the etiology of POAG. Our data implicate dysregulation in lipid metabolism and mitochondrial function in glaucoma etiology and suggest new targets for glaucoma prevention or therapies,” the authors wrote.
Collapse
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts