Fluctuation in systolic blood pressure is a major systemic risk factor for development of primary open-angle glaucoma

We evaluated the risk of development of primary open-angle glaucoma (POAG) in terms of variability in BP using a nationwide, population-based, 11-year longitudinal study using the Korean National Health Insurance Research Database. We included patients who underwent health care examinations more than twice between January 2002 and December 2006. We divided all subjects by the quartiles of variability in systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), and the difference between SBP and DBP. Of the total of 80,021 included subjects, 910 were diagnosed with POAG between January 2007 and December 2013. Both the Kaplan-Meier survival curves and log-rank test data indicated that patients with higher-level BP variability developed POAG significantly more frequently than did patients with lower-level variability (P < 0.001). On multivariate Cox’s regression modeling including gender, age, sex, household income, smoking status, level of alcohol intake, extent of exercise, diabetes mellitus status, dyslipidemia status, SBP, and DBP; the hazard ratios among the highest and lowest quartiles of SD SBP and CV SBP were 1.256 and 1.238, respectively. Our findings suggest that subjects in the highest quartile of SBP variability were significantly more likely to develop POAG in our population-based sample of Korean adults.