Twelve-year incidence of retinal vein occlusion and its trend in Korea

To estimate the 12-year incidence and trends of clinically diagnosed retinal vein occlusion (RVO) in Korea.

This is a nationwide population-based retrospective study using the Korean national health claims database from 2002 to 2015. The study consisted of the entire Korean population based on the 2015 Census of Population. We identified patients with incident RVO in 2004-2015. We estimated the crude incidence rates and age- and sex-standardized incidence rates in each 12-year study period. To determine the trend, we also performed joinpoint regression analyses.

We identified 240,495 incident RVO cases. The average incidence rate was 48.09 (95% confidence interval [CI], 47.92-48.27). Women showed a 1.24 times higher incidence rate (53.18 [95% CI, 52.92-53.44]) compared with men (42.78 [95% CI, 42.55-43.02]), while, among patients aged less than 50 years and those aged 80 years or over, men showed higher incidence rates than did women. The highest incidence of 193.56 (95% CI, 191.06-196.06) was observed in the age group of 75 to 79 years. The joinpoint analysis showed an increasing trend of RVO incidence among patients at the age of 70 years and older (annual percentage change, 2.1; 95% CI, 0.2-4.0; p < 0.01).

RVO is a disease of the elderly that peaks in the late 70s and occurs more in women than in men. In Korea, RVO incidence increased from 2004 to 2015 among the population aged 70 years or older, while among those aged less than 70 years, no trend was observed in RVO incidence rates.