[Factor analysis of the risk of developing primary open-angle glaucoma]

Primary open-angle glaucoma (POAG) is the most common form of glaucoma. Insufficient information about the pathogenetic aspects of POAG development necessitates further research of the main clinical, functional, and genetic risk factors for the disease development, as well as their correlations using modern methods of mathematical analysis.

To assess the significance of risk factors in POAG development based on multivariate analysis of variance.

The study included 348 patients (348 eyes) with stages I-IV POAG aged 45 to 87 years, who underwent a comprehensive ophthalmological and genetic examination. The control group consisted of 48 individuals (48 eyes) without glaucoma, matched with POAG patients in terms of gender and age. Ophthalmological examination of patients was carried out in 2013-2019 at the «Optimed» Laser Eye Surgery Center in Ufa, molecular genetic research - at the Institute of Biochemistry and Genetics of the Ufa Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The results were statistically processed using the IBM SPSS Statistics v.21 program. The multivariate analysis employed the principal component method. Correlations between patient parameters and main factors were calculated using the method of rotation - varimax. The significance level was taken equal to 0.05 when testing statistical hypotheses.

Factor analysis was used to rank the factors associated with POAG development, the following variables were attributed to the most significant indicators of high risk (16.75% of the total variance) of developing the disease: age, comorbidity index, cataract, pseudoexfoliative syndrome, pigmentation intensity in the anterior chamber angle.

Factor analysis is a multivariate method of mathematical analysis that allows studying the role of the risk factors for POAG development and their association with the disease, which contributes to early diagnosis and identification of clinical and functional features of the disease.