Lee SE, et al. - Using the Korean National Health Insurance Service database, researchers explored the link between diabetic retinopathy (DR) and incident Parkinson disease (PD). The results of this study revealed that concurrent DR was related to an increased risk of incident PD.

Methods

• Participants in the study were 14,912,368 members who had regular health checkups from 2005 to 2008.
• For this investigation, study participants were classified into non-diabetes, diabetes without DR, and diabetes with DR groups at baseline and followed up until the date of PD incidence, death, or December 31, 2013.
• To assess the relationship between DR and incident PD, Cox proportional hazards regression analysis was utilized.

Results

• Thirty-four thousand, eight hundred thirty-four subjects were newly diagnosed with PD during the period.
• It was observed that the incidence of PD was 2.74, 8.39, and 15.51 per 10,000 person-years for the non-diabetes, diabetes without DR, and diabetes with DR groups, respectively.
• DR groups were related to significantly increased risk of PD than non-diabetes or diabetes without DR groups even after adjusting for age, sex, fasting plasma glucose level, insulin usage, and other possible risk factors in multivariate Cox proportional hazard models.