Diabetes and Cholesterol Drugs Lower the Risk of Eye Disease in Older Adults

How do diabetes and cholesterol drugs help older people? The regular intake of these drugs may reduce the prevalence of age-related macular degeneration.

Regular use of drugs to lower cholesterol and control type 2 diabetes may lessen the risk of the degenerative eye disease associated with aging, which is known as AMD, finds a pooled data analysis of the available evidence, published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.

These common drugs are found to lower the prevalence of AMD (age-related macular degeneration) in European populations, as per the results.

What is Age-Related Macular Degeneration?

AMD is the leading cause of severe visual impairment among older age people in high-income countries. In Europe alone, 67 million people currently have the condition, with new cases projected to soar over the next few decades as populations age.

Age Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) - Causes, Symptoms, Diagnosis, Treatment & Prevention
Age related macular degeneration is a disease of the elderly, wherein the macula or the central part of the retina gets affected, leading to loss of vision.

‘Dampening your cholesterol and blood sugar level, lowers the risk of age-related macular degeneration.’

AMD affects central vision and the ability to see fine detail. Various genetic and environmental factors associated with aging found to trigger AMD, but it’s still not clear how best to prevent it or slow its progression.

Previously published research suggests that drugs to lower cholesterol, control diabetes, and dampen down inflammation may help to lower the risk of developing AMD, but these findings were partially contradictory and based on a few participants.

In a bid to get around these issues, the researchers pooled the results of 14 population-based and hospital-based studies, involving 38,694 people from France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Russia, and the UK.

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The studies were part of the European Eye Epidemiology (E3) consortium, a collaborative pan-European network, the principal aim of the study is to develop and analyze large pooled datasets to further the understanding of eye disease and sight loss.

Participants with the age of 50 and taking at least one of the following types of drugs to lower cholesterol, including statins; control diabetes, including insulin; to dampen down inflammation, excluding steroids; and Levodopa, used to treat movement disorders caused by neurodegenerative disease.

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Gene therapy gives new hope for age-related blindness. Scientists were able to deliver the gene for a retinal opsin into the genome of ganglion cells using an adeno-associated viral vector. The blind ganglion cells were restored and became sensitive to light.

The prevalence of AMD ranged from 12% to 64.5% across the included studies—9332 cases in total—while the prevalence of advanced (late) AMD ranged from 0.5% to 35.5%—951 cases in total.

The pooled data analysis showed that drugs to lower cholesterol or control diabetes were associated with, respectively, 15% and 22% lower prevalence of any type of AMD, after accounting for potentially influential factors.

Stem Cells are a Potential Therapy for Age-related Macular Degeneration
The presence of primary cilia on retinal pigment epithelial cells is necessary for their proper structure and function in dry age-related macular degeneration.

No such associations were found for any of the other types of drugs or advanced AMD, in particular, although there were only a relatively small number of such cases, note the researchers.

Theirs is the first large pooled data analysis of its kind to use individual-level data from various population-based and hospital-based studies.

Yet, further longitudinal data are needed to confirm our findings, which are inherently limited by using cross-sectional data only and cannot infer causality.

But the findings point to a likely key role for metabolic processes in the development of AMD, which may offer potential new avenues for treatment and have implications for public health messaging.

Source-Eurekalert