Findings from the 45 and Up Study: smoking is not associated with the risk of early-onset cataract

Abstract

Background: To determine if tobacco smoking is a risk factor for early-onset cataracts.Methods: This was a prospective population-based cohort study. A total of 70,886 participants aged 45-55 years in the 45 and Up Study were included in our analysis. Early-onset cataracts (EOC) were defined as cataract surgeries performed before 65 years old, based on participant data linked to the Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS). Smoking habits were assessed at baseline, based on a self-administered questionnaire. A Cox proportional hazards model was used to evaluate the association between tobacco smoking and the risk of early-onset cataracts over the follow-up period.Results: At baseline recruitment, 59.9% of study participants never smoked, 30.5% were former smokers, and 9.6% were current smokers. A total of 1,713 participants underwent cataract surgery over a mean followup of 625,042 person-years, with an incidence of 2.74 cases per 1,000 person-years. For current smokers, patients with EOC had longer smoking durations (P=0.019). For former smokers, patients with EOC had higher smoking intensities (P=0.001), were older at smoking commencement (P=0.011), and longer times since quitting (P=0.04). The risk of EOC was not found to be significantly different between current smokers or former smokers, compared to those who had never smoked. Both stratification and sensitivity analyses by gender, surgery year, alcohol intake, physical activity, and income yielded similar results.Conclusions: Smoking has neither a beneficial nor harmful effect on the long-term incidence of EOC.

Appetitive Lifestyles and Obesity with Risk of Senile Cataract: An Univariable and Multivariable Mendelian Randomization Study

“…About cigarette smoking, despite the association between cigarette smoking and SC has been suggested in massive epidemiological studies, in which both current and past smokers appeared to have higher risk of developing cataract compared with never-smokers, even a dose-response effect between smoking and cataract was detected, especially for PSC and nuclear cataract [46][47][48][49] , several other studies demonstrated inconsistent results that smoking was not associated with the higher risk for SC [15,16] . Interestingly, it is also reported that smoking had neither positive nor negative effects on the long-term incidence for early-onset cataract [50] . Of note, the latest umbrella review of systematic reviews and meta-analyses identified that smoking as a risk factor for cataract was the most robust association among various factors and major age-related eye disorders [51] .…”