Disease and Intraocular Pressure: A Study to Evaluate the Relationship Between Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

An elevation of intraocular pressure if left undiagnosed or untreated may progress to ocular hypertension and glaucoma or glaucomatous optic neuropathy with irreversible visual loss. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, being a leading cause of death in the world, is a major cause of chronic morbidity and mortality. Ocular co-morbidities found to be associated with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease were glaucoma and cataract. METHODS: This study has considered a hundred diagnosed cases of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and tried to evaluate the relationship between intraocular pressure and the pulmonary arterial pressure and also to find if with a rise in pulmonary arterial pressure there was a simultaneous rise in the intraocular pressure. The intraocular pressure was measured in thus study by Applanation Tonometry and the pulmonary arterial pressure was recorded using 2-D ECHO. RESULTS: There was found to be medium correlation between pulmonary arterial pressure and the intraocular pressure of both the right eye and the left eye and p values was found to be 0.003 and 0.000 respectively which were of strong significance (p<0.01). There was also found to be a tendency of both the pulmonary arterial pressure and the intraocular pressure to rise with age in the study group. The intraocular pressure of the right eye was found to be higher that of the left eye. INTERPRETATION & CONCLUSION: This study has shown that both intraocular pressure and pulmonary arterial pressure increases with age. Thus the patients who have been diagnosed to have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, of which increased pulmonary arterial pressure is a common feature, must regularly be screened for the development of raised intraocular pressure as a timely detection in such patients would prevent them from developing ocular hypertension and glaucoma with irreversible visual loss.