Abstract
Purpose To investigate the relationship between visual impairment (VI) and dementia in the UK Biobank Study. Design Prospective cohort study. Methods A total of 117,187 volunteers (aged 40-69 years) deemed free of dementia at baseline were included. Habitual distance visual acuity worse than 0.3 logMAR units in the better-seeing eye was used to define VI. The incident dementia was based on electronically linked hospital inpatient and death records. Results During a median follow-up of 5.96 years, the presence of VI was significantly associated with incident dementia (hazard ratio: 1.78; 95% confidence interval: 1.18-2.68; P = .006). There was a clear trend between the severity of VI and risk of dementia (P for trend = .002). Conclusions We found VI was associated with increased risk of dementia, with a progressively greater risk among those with worse visual acuity. Our findings suggested that VI might be a modifiable risk factor for dementia and highlighted the potential value of VI elimination to delay the manifestation of dementia.
Xueli Zhang
PhD of Bioinformatics, Assistant Professor
My research interest is to explore the comorbidity relationship of diseases based on complex networks and to find new combination markers, and has constructed multiple biomarker databases and prediction models.