AAO 2024: Incidence and prevalence of uveitis and associated ocular complications in the US TriNetX Database

Meghan Berkenstock, MD, an associate professor of ophthalmology at the Wilmer Eye Institute, provides insights on paper from the uveitis free paper section of AAO 2024, about the use of TriNetX database to assess for the incidence and prevalence of both uveitis and its complications.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Meghan Berkenstock, MD: My name's Meghan Berkenstock. I'm an associate professor of ophthalmology at the Wilmer Eye Institute, and today I'm going to be talking about our paper, which is going to be presented in the uveitis free paper section, about the use of TriNetX database to assess for the incidence and prevalence of both uveitis and its complications. As we know the uveities are an umbrella-term for 30 different types of ocular inflammation. The incidence and prevalence has a wide range in the current literature. We use the TriNetX database, which has over 120 million subjects with de-identified data, in order to assess the incidence and prevalence of uveitis in the United States, as well as ocular complications, including macular edema, glaucoma, and ocular hypertension. For methods, we used ICD codes to identify these patients in the comorbidities between the years of 2013 to 2023 to allow us to have a cumulative incidence and prevalence.

Our main outcome measures were annual incidence and prevalence of uveitis, sub-classified by anatomic location, in addition to the incidence and prevalence of each of the comorbidities we discussed. Among the 300,814 patients with uveitis, the mean age was 57 years, with a predominance of females who were Caucasian. Anterior uveitis was the most common subtype, and the most commonly used immunosuppressants were prednisone and methotrexate. The most commonly associated systemic disease was ankylosing spondylitis, and the most frequent complications were, in order, glaucoma or ocular hypertension, followed by macular edema and cataract. The cumulative incidence and prevalence rates of uveitis [from] 2013 to 2023 were 60 and 285 out of 100,000 people, respectively. So our study presents a comprehensive analysis of uveitis in the United States with a database that is almost analogous to the United States population, allowing for generalizability of our study. One of the strengths is the large number of patients in the database, but of course, one of the limitations of the study is accurate coding within a large data set.