Epidemiology of eye diseases

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Background

The public health system is continually reminded of the challenges posed by the limited understanding of the diseases. It was recommended that every public health agency should collect, assemble, analyze, and make available information on the health of the community, including statistics on health status, community health needs, and epidemiologic and other studies of health problems. Ocular disease management is a crucial part of the health care system as some ocular diseases are of high prevalence, like cataracts and myopia, and will heavily affect the living quality of people. In addition, some are closely related to other systemic diseases like diabetic retinopathy and retinal vascular occlusion. Regarding the lack of comprehensive pathologic mechanism knowledge and the complexity of proper detection, diagnosis, and treatment, population-based cohort studies provide a choice to investigate the interactions of genes, environment, society, and personal lifestyle with disease onset and progression. Large, comprehensive, and systemic population-based cohort studies are necessary and are the trend of future clinical studies. We both use the American Academy of Ophthalmology IRIS® Registry (Intelligent Research in Sight) and Harvard Ophthalmology in-house data to study the epidemiology of eye diseases.

The American Academy of Ophthalmology IRIS® Registry (Intelligent Research in Sight) dataset is one of the large clinical ocular disease registries in the United States. It consists of data from more than 349 million patient visits of 60 million unique patients in the United States (as of September 1, 2020). The IRIS® Registry collects 5 eye care measures, 10 general prevention and patient safety measures, and 18 outcome measures from over 3,800 ophthalmic practices in the United States, and continually tracks patients’ history in the same specialty, including initial patient visits, intervention, and longitudinal follow-up. The IRIS platform provides a large-scale glimpse into the trends of eye disease, features, and real-world conditions such as patients’ identification and diagnosis, choices of treatment, and outcomes. Our Massachusetts Eye and Ear Dataset contains retinal imaging and visual field tests that are not available in the IRIS Registry. We have demographic and clinical information for 1.69 million patients, 1.91 million fundus photos from 67,000 patients, 900,000 Zeiss Cirrus optical coherence tomography scans from 85,000 patients, 1.65 million Helderberg Spectralis optical coherence tomography scans from 73,000 patients, and 450,000 visual fields from 78,000 patients.

What We Do

We have conducted comprehensive statistical analyses to understand the complex inter-relationship between demographics, socioeconomics, and eye disease characteristics. Check out our open-source code repositories on our Harvard Ophthalmology AI Lab GitHub account.

Selected Publications

  • Yang, S.A., Ciociola, E.C., Mitchell, W., Hall, N., Lorch, A.C., Miller, J.W., Friedman, D.S., Boland, M.V., Elze, T., Zebardast, N. and Pershing, S., 2023. Effectiveness of Microinvasive Glaucoma Surgery in the United States: Intelligent Research in Sight Registry Analysis 2013–2019. Ophthalmology, 130(3), pp.242-255.
  • Ciociola, E.C., Yang, S.A., Hall, N., Lorch, A.C., Miller, J.W., Friedman, D.S., Boland, M.V., Elze, T., Zebardast, N., Pershing, S. and Hyman, L., 2023. Effectiveness of Trabeculectomy and Tube Shunt with versus without Concurrent Phacoemulsification: Intelligent Research in Sight Registry Longitudinal Analysis. Ophthalmology Glaucoma, 6(1), pp.42-53.
  • Li, Y., Hall, N.E., Pershing, S., Hyman, L., Haller, J.A., Lee, A.Y., Lee, C.S., Chiang, M., Lum, F., Miller, J.W. and Lorch, A., 2022. Age, gender, and laterality of retinal vascular occlusion: a retrospective study from the IRIS® Registry. Ophthalmology Retina, 6(2), pp.161-171.
  • Pang, Y., Tang, M., Shi, M., Elze, T., Pasquale, L.R., Zebardast, N., Friedman, D.S., Boland, M., Shen, L.Q. and Wang, M., 2023. The Impact of Demographics on Regional Visual Field Loss and Worsening in Glaucoma. Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, 64(8), pp.105-105.
  • Halawa, O.A., Kolli, A., Oh, G., Mitchell, W.G., Glynn, R.J., Kim, D.H., Friedman, D.S. and Zebardast, N., 2022. Racial and socioeconomic differences in eye care utilization among Medicare beneficiaries with glaucoma. Ophthalmology, 129(4), pp.397-405.
  • Halawa, O.A., Kang, J., Parikh, A.A., Oh, G., Glynn, R.J., Friedman, D.S., Kim, D.H. and Zebardast, N., 2023. Relationship between claims-based frailty index and eye care utilization among medicare beneficiaries with glaucoma. Ophthalmology, 130(6), pp.646-654.
  • Kang, J.H., Wang, M., Frueh, L., Rosner, B., Wiggs, J.L., Elze, T. and Pasquale, L.R., 2022. Cohort study of race/ethnicity and incident primary open-angle glaucoma characterized by autonomously determined visual field loss patterns. Translational Vision Science & Technology, 11(7), pp.21-21.