The Development of Glaucoma after Surgery-Indicated Chronic Rhinosinusitis: A Population-Based Cohort Study

This study investigates the development of glaucoma in subjects with surgery-indicated chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS) by the use of the National Health Insurance Research Database in Taiwan. Individuals that received the functional endoscopic sinus surgery (FESS) with a diagnostic code of CRS were regarded as surgery-indicated CRS and enrolled in the study group. Four non-CRS patients were age- and gender-matched to each patient in the study group. The exclusion criteria included legal blindness, ocular tumor, history of eyeball removal, and previous glaucoma. The outcome was regarded as the development of glaucoma, and conditional logistic regression was used for the statistical analysis, which involved multiple potential risk factors in the multivariate model. A total of 6506 patients with surgery-indicated CRS that received FESS and another 26,024 non-CRS individuals were enrolled after exclusion. The age and gender distributions were identical between the two groups due to matching. There were 108 and 294 glaucoma events in the study group and control group, respectively, during the follow-up period, and the study group had a significantly higher adjusted hazard ratio (1.291, 95% confidential interval: 1.031–1.615). The cumulative probability analysis also revealed a correlation between the occurrence of glaucoma and the CRS disease interval. In the subgroup analysis, the chance of developing open-angle glaucoma and normal-tension glaucoma was significantly higher in the study group than in the control group. In conclusion, the existence of surgery-indicated CRS is a significant risk factor for the development of glaucoma, which correlated with the disease interval.