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- Sweden
- register
- intraocular pressure
- hypothyroidism
- pharmacoepidemiology
- angle
- public health
- epidemiology
- pharmacology
The issue of the possible association between hypothyroidism and glaucoma is well studied but still remains controversial. Some previous studies have found a correlation between hypothyroidism and open-angle glaucoma1–3 whereas others have not.4–6 Our aim was to test the hypothesis that hypothyroidism is associated with open-angle glaucoma in a large nationwide register-based cohort study on filled prescriptions, a design unique to the existing literature on the subject.
All 2 088 297 residents in Sweden aged 60–89 years who were alive during the period 31 December 2007 to 31 December 2008 constituted our source population. We used the unique personal identity number, assigned to each Swedish resident (about 9 million in total), to link information from three population-based registers of almost complete coverage and high quality—the Prescribed Drug Register, the Cause of Death Register and the Register of the Total Population.
The Swedish Prescribed …
Footnotes
Funding RL was partly supported by grants from the Astrid and David Hagelén Foundation and from the Swedish Research Council (SIMSAM).
Competing interests None.
Ethics approval The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare is a government agency and may, in accordance with Swedish law, use population-based registers to follow and analyse health and social conditions among the general population. Data were made available to us in such a way that individuals could not be identified.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.