Original articleIncidence and prevalence of uveitis in Northern California: The Northern California Epidemiology of Uveitis Study☆
Section snippets
Study design
This cross-sectional study used retrospective database and medical record review.
Study objectives
The purposes of this study were to (1) calculate incidence and prevalence of endogenous uveitis in the target population overall and stratified by gender and age; (2) calculate incidence and prevalence of different categories of uveitis by using the International Uveitis Study Group terminology for the target population overall and stratified by gender and age; and (3) compare results from this study with the
Results
The midterm study population of the 6 communities consisted of 731 895 patients, whose demographic characteristics are shown in Table 2 and whose age- and gender-stratified population data are shown in Table 3.
During the study period, 6452 patients in the KP Northern California Region received target diagnoses at least once. Of these patients, 2070 were members of the 6 study communities. These patients were seen at 21 separate outpatient eye clinics. Some of these patients were seen initially
Discussion
This population-based study of the epidemiology of uveitis is the largest of its kind to be performed. The findings contrast sharply with the only previous U.S. population-based study2 of the incidence and prevalence of uveitis. The present study found a much higher incidence and prevalence of disease and a peak in rate of disease with older age compared with a peak in rate of disease in the middle adult years, a result reported in Darrell and associates' Minnesota study.2
Table 8 shows other
Acknowledgements
Bruce Fireman, MA, assisted with advice on biostatistical analysis, and B. Michael Kamen, BSIE, RN, assisted in analysis of outpatient diagnoses and database design. Tracy Lee, CCS, CCS-P, assisted with Outpatient Services Clinical Records code citation. The Medical Editing Department, Kaiser Foundation Research Institute, provided editorial assistance.
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Cited by (0)
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Manuscript no. 220650.
Funding for the study was provided by a Permanente Medical Group Innovations Grant and a grant from the Kaiser Permanente Community Benefit Program.