The Impact of Donor History of Sleep Apnea on Corneal Tissue Evaluation Parameters

The goal of this study was to explore whether the donor history of sleep apnea affects corneal tissue evaluation parameters.

This was a retrospective study assessing the impact of donor history of sleep apnea in a dataset obtained from the Eversight Eye Bank. Comparative analysis and multivariate regression were used to assess differences in key parameters including endothelial cell density (ECD) and central corneal thickness.

Data analyzed consisted of 50,170 tissues from 25,399 donors with no history of sleep apnea and 5473 tissues from 2774 donors with a history of sleep apnea. Tissue from donors with a history of sleep apnea showed lower ECD than those from donors with no history of sleep apnea (-51 cells/mm 2 , P < 0.001). Multivariate linear regression demonstrated that history of sleep apnea was a predictor of lower ECD by 13.72 cells/mm 2 ( P = 0.0264). Secondary analysis demonstrated that underweight and obese body mass indexes were significant predictors of increased ECD in donors with no history of sleep apnea ( P < 0.0001, P = 0.025, respectively). Body mass index category was not a significant predictor of ECD in donors with a history of sleep apnea. In a smaller subset of 10,756 tissues, sleep apnea was not a significant predictor of central corneal thickness.

This is the first study to demonstrate that a donor's history of sleep apnea is associated with a lower ECD in a large eye bank dataset. Future studies are needed to investigate whether history of sleep apnea affects posttransplantation outcomes.