Adolescent myopia in women related to increased risk of types 2 diabetes: Study

Israel: In a study performed by Alon Peled and colleagues, it was shown that for women, myopia in adolescence was related to a considerably elevated risk of incidence type 2 diabetes (T2D) in early adulthood, in a severity-dependent way. This data lends credence to the involvement of insulin resistance in the etiology of myopia. The findings of this study were published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism on 10th September 2021.

The researchers intended to investigate if there was a link between myopia and insulin resistance, as well as look into the relationship between myopia in adolescence and the occurrence of type 2 diabetes (T2D) in young adults.

This was a Population-based, retrospective, cohort study where, during the period 1993-2012, 1,329,705 teenagers (579,543 women, 43.6 percent) aged 16-19 years were medically evaluated before to required military duty and their data were connected to the Israel National Diabetes Registry. Myopia was determined using refractive data from the right eye. Cox proportional models were used to estimate hazard ratios (HRs) for T2D incidence per person-years of follow-up for men and women separately.

Key Findings:

o With T2D, there was a relationship between myopia and sex.

o T2D incidence rates (per 100,000 person-years) in women were 16.6, 19.2, and 25.1 for individuals without myopia, mild-to-moderate myopia, and extreme myopia, respectively.

o These findings equated to HRs of 1.29 and 1.63 (1.21-2.18) for women with mild-to-moderate and extreme myopia, respectively, as compared to those who did not have myopia.

o Every 1 diopter lower spherical equivalent resulted in a 6.5 percent higher adjusted HR for T2D incidence when controlled as a continuous variable. Among males, there was no significant relationship.

In conclusion, the paper points out the significantly increased effects and the relationship between myopia and type 2 diabetes, and how one affects the other positively. "This finding may support the role of insulin resistance in myopia pathogenesis," wrote the authors. 

Reference:

Peled, A., Raz, I., Zucker, I., Derazne, E., Megreli, J., Pinhas-Hamiel, O., Einan-Lifshitz, A., Morad, Y., Pras, E., Lutski, M., Cukierman-Yaffe, T., Mosenzon, O., Tzur, D., Tirosh, A., Gerstein, H. C., Afek, A., & Twig, G. (2021). Myopia and Early Onset Type 2 Diabetes: A Nationwide Cohort Study. The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. https://doi.org/10.1210/clinem/dgab669