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The British Journal of Ophthalmology

Erectile dysfunction drugs linked to glaucoma risk in men

Men prescribed erectile dysfunction drugs had higher glaucoma odds than nonusers, with odds ratios of 1.29 and 1.17 in two UK databases.

Paper by Ruolan Fan, Arturo González-Izquierdo, Muhammad Qummer Ul Arfeen, +7 more authorsChristopher G. Owen · University College London · City St George's, University of London
Figure 1 from The British Journal of Ophthalmology
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Figure 1. Fan et al.

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Populations
Studied:
Case-control study of 876,872 people

Editor of record: Boris Djordjevic · AgingResearch.News

Paper
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UK men aged 40 or older were studied in a prospective nested case-control analysis of primary care records from 2005 to 2022. It compared 218,056 men with primary open-angle glaucoma, a cause of irreversible sight loss, with 876,872 men without glaucoma. Their mean ages were 69 and 68 years, respectively. Cases and controls were matched by age and general practice.

Erectile dysfunction drugs were prescribed to 20% of cases and 17% of controls. After accounting for age, ethnicity and socioeconomic status, medication use was linked to higher glaucoma odds. The odds ratios were 1.29 in the Gold database and 1.17 in Aurum; values above 1 indicate higher odds. The association persisted after further adjustment for smoking, high blood pressure and other conditions.

Why it matters

Older age was linked to higher glaucoma risk in these records. The authors suggest that blood-vessel mechanisms, rather than a direct drug effect, may underlie the medication link.

Caveats

Men prescribed these drugs may have differed from nonusers in underlying blood-vessel health. The analysis covered only men aged 40 or older, and its glaucoma codes included some other forms of the disease.

From the paper

Participants

The combined study population across the two datasets included 218 056 men with POAG and 876 872 matched controls, yielding a total of 1 094 928 participants.

Results

Result

After adjustment for age, sex, IMD and ethnicity (model 2), the OR for POAG among men with ED compared with those without was 1.29 (95% CI 1.25 to 1.32, p<0.001) in the CPRD Gold dataset and 1.17 (95% CI 1.15 to 1.18, p<0.001) in CPRD Aurum (figure 3).

Results, Supplemental material

Events by group

In the Gold dataset, ED was present in 14.8% (95% CI 14.6% to 15.1%) of POAG cases and 12.2% (95% CI 12.1% to 12.4%) of controls.

Results

Quoted word for word from the full text on bjo.bmj.com.

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