According to a large cohort study, patients with open-angle glaucoma are at higher risk for suffering a stroke. This report was published in the journal Stroke.

The researchers evaluated the risk of stroke development after the diagnosis of open-angle glaucoma. The cohort included 4032 patients with open-angle glaucoma from the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database. The comparison cohort was comprised of randomly selected patients (n=20,160) who were matched with the study group in terms of age, gender, geographic location, and comorbid medical disorders. Patients were tracked from their index visits for 5 years.

In this study, stroke developed in 14.9% of the patients with open-angle glaucoma and 9.5% of the patients in the comparison cohort during the 5-year follow-up period. The patients with glaucoma had significantly lower 5-year stroke-free survival rates than patients in the comparison cohort.

After adjusting the data, patients with open-angle glaucoma were found to have a 1.52-fold higher risk of having a stroke.

Read the abstract/article here ^[1] (log in required) in the journal Stroke.