High Focused Evaluation of Atherosclerotic Risk Profile in Retinal Thrombosis: Vascular Events Incidence, Sex Involvement and Interventional Outcomes Assessed by Ophthalmologists and Internists Network

The retinal vein occlusion (RVO) is the second most common retinal disease after diabetic retinopathy, and is a common cause of unilateral visual loss. The occlusion of a branch of the central retinal vein (BRVO) and central retinal vein occlusion (CRVO) are two topics discussed and very deserving of further study, especially for the need of greater clarity arising from the availability of new diagnostic and especially therapeutic opportunities.

The literature on the prevalence of RVO is not particularly rich, and the results of the available studies are very heterogeneous because such studies are conducted on a few cases, using different methodologies and are mainly characterized by a different distribution of risk factors among the different populations. In this regard, it was particularly interesting a publication of 2010 which proposed a combined analysis of the main study population (population based study).

The sample of the final analysis was of 49 869 subjects, and the results showed that the retinal vein occlusion overall prevalence, standardized for age and sex, is 5.2 per 1000, of which 4.42 and 0.80 to BRVO and CRVO respectively. Despite the slightly higher prevalence in females, this difference wasn't statistically significant.

In contrast, the prevalence of venous occlusion increases with increasing age in a statistically significant manner, both in the overall analysis of the occlusions of branch and central, that for the individual entities. This pattern is characteristic of chronic degenerative diseases and in fact the RVO has a behavior very similar to that of these diseases, probably because the risk factors (especially those such as atherosclerosis and systemic hypertension) increases with age.

The results provided by these systematic analysis are particularly important because they provide a reliable estimate of RVO prevalence in general population; must be considered, however, the inherent limitations mainly concerning potential sources of heterogeneity, such as different methodologies used, the fact that most of the studies were carried out on a single ethnic group, often with different distribution of risk factors and therefore were not suitable to capture these differences.