The following transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hi, my name is Katherine E. Talcott, MD, FASRS. I’m here at Retina World Congress and I just had the opportunity to present our work looking at either patients who had a retinal vein occlusion (RVO) or central retinal vein occlusion (CRVO) and the risk of any adverse events to their systemic circulation, including if they had a stroke or a heart attack.

The idea for the study is that patients who have branch retinal vein occlusion (BRVO) and CRVO have risk factors, such as high blood pressure or high cholesterol or diabetes. We wanted to see if having either a vein blockage—either in terms of a BRVO or CRVO—would be an additional risk factor for these events. So to be able to perform this hypothesis-generating study, we looked at the TriNetX database and compared patients who had these outcomes to control populations. We used patients who had a diagnosis of cataract as a surrogate.

We matched for any risk factors, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, as well as any use of blood thinners. And then we looked at our outcomes.

Interestingly, we found that patients who had both BRVO and CRVO were at an increased risk of having these systemic adverse events (AEs), including heart attack, stroke—both ischemic and hemorrhagic—as well as carotid disease.

We then wanted to stratify those patients who have vein occlusions between those who needed a lot of anti-VEGF injections and those who needed less, to be able to see if there was an association. We found that patients who needed more anti-VEGF injections were more likely to have a heart attack, but we did not find a significant finding for the rest of those sort of outcomes.

So overall, our take-home message from this study was that we know that patients who have vein occlusions are at increased risk of having these systemic AEs. So when you’re taking care of these patients you might want to think about making sure that they're following up with their primary care doctors or their cardiologists to make sure that any of those modifiable risk factors are identified and controlled for these patients, to decrease their risk of having these systemic AEs.

Thank you so much. RP