Prevalence of circulatory disease among patients undergoing intracapsular cataract extraction

Prevalences of 15 circulatory diagnoses were investigated for 113,242 patients undergoing intracapsular cataract extraction and 67,052 reference patients discharged from a sample of North American hospitals during 1979. After controlling for distributional differences in age (nine categories between 45 and 89 years), sex, and race (white v nonwhite), seven of the 15 diagnoses occurred with sufficient frequency to allow age-, sex-, and race-adjusted analysis. All seven of those diagnoses were found to have statistically significant differences in prevalences between the two procedure groups. Only benign hypertension was found to be more prevalent among patients undergoing cataract extraction regardless of age, sex, or race. The remaining six diagnoses all had a pattern of elevated prevalence among younger patients undergoing cataract extraction changing to elevated prevalence among other surgical patients at older ages.