Risk of Incident Dry Eye Disease Among Patients with Chronic Pain Conditions.
Chronic pain conditions are associated with a nearly five-fold higher hazard of dry eye disease.
Risk of Incident Dry Eye Disease Among Patients with Chronic Pain Conditions.
To evaluate whether chronic pain conditions (chronic pain conditions) are associated with increased risk of incident dry eye disease (dry eye disease) and prescription-requiring dry eye disease in a large electronic health record network.
After 1:1 propensity score-matching, 538,364 patients were included per cohort.
chronic pain conditions mean a nearly five times higher risk of developing dry eye disease
Patients with at least one chronic pain conditions diagnosis had significantly higher risk of incident dry eye disease compared with controls at all follow-up intervals.
At 1 year, incident dry eye disease occurred in 3.34% of the chronic pain conditions cohort versus 0.72% (RR 4.64; 95% CI, 4.49-4.81; p<0.0001).
At 3 years, cumulative incidence increased to 7.16% versus 1.50% (RR 4.78; 95% CI, 4.66-4.89; p<0.0001).
Prescription-requiring dry eye disease was also more common in the chronic pain conditions cohort at 3 years (0.79% vs 0.30%; RR 2.60; 95% CI, 2.45-2.75).
Chronic pain conditions are strongly associated with an increased risk of incident and prescription-requiring dry eye disease.
These findings support consideration of chronic pain conditions as risk factors in the evaluation and management of dry eye disease and suggest that a subset of patients with dry eye disease may reflect broader pain-processing abnormalities.