Prevalence of circulatory disease among patients undergoing intracapsular cataract extraction
R. P. Hirsch and B. Schwartz
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.
