Blue light-filtering IOL fails to arrest AMD after cataract surgery: Study

There were 21,126 BF-IOL implants and 165,465 non-BF-IOL implants in total. When compared to the non-BF-IOL group, patients in the BF-IOL group were younger, had fewer males, had different cataract surgery years, had higher income, more non-manual workers, more patients from urban and suburban regions, and less chronic illnesses. After a mean of 6.1 years of follow-up after cataract surgery, 12,533 and 1,655 patients acquired non-exudative AMD and exudative AMD, respectively. Non-exudative AMD and exudative AMD incidence rates (per 1000 person-years) were 9.95 and 1.22 for the BF-IOL group, respectively, and 11.13 and 1.44 for the non-BF-IOL group. There was no significant difference in the incidence rate of non-exudative AMD and exudative AMD between the two IOL groups after PSM.

The authors of the study acknowledge several limitations of their work, including the fact that IOL group assignment was not randomized, confounders due to the study's retrospective nature, the use of ICD codes to identify patients, and that a longer follow-up period may be more sensitive in detecting the effect of blue light-filtering IOLs on AMD incidence.

Reference:

Lee, J.-S., Li, P.-R., Hou, C.-H., Lin, K.-K., Kuo, C.-F., & See, L.-C. (2021). Effect of blue light-filtering intraocular lenses on age-related macular degeneration: A nationwide cohort study with 10-year follow-up. In American Journal of Ophthalmology. Elsevier BV. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajo.2021.08.002