Abstract: Comorbitities of dry eye

...in other words, what other diseases are most commonly shared by people who have dry eye?

Only a couple of these (RA and lupus) are directly related to dry eye; some others are probably related through medication. But overall many of the conditions on this list are many things which like dry eye are just more common in an elderly population.

Comorbidities of dry eye disease: a nationwide population-based study.
Acta Ophthalmol. 2010 Aug 31. [Epub ahead of print]
Wang TJ, Wang IJ, Hu CC, Lin HC.
Department of Ophthalmology, Taipei Medical University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan.

Purpose:
To investigate the comorbidities of dry eye disease in a nationwide population-based data in Taiwan.

Methods:
This study features a study group and a comparison group. The study group comprised 12 007 patients who sought ambulatory care for treatment of dry eye in 2005 and 2006. In total, 36 021 randomly selected patients were in the comparison group. Conditional logistic regression analyses conditioned on gender, age, monthly income and level of urbanization of the community in which the patient resided were conducted to calculate the odds ratio (OR) for each of 33 comorbidities among patients with and without dry eye disease.

Results:
The regression analyses revealed that compared to patients without dry eye disease, patients with dry eye disease were more likely to have comorbidities of ischaemic heart disease (OR = 1.36), hyperlipidaemia (OR = 1.68), cardiac arrhythmias (OR = 1.55), peripheral vascular disorders (OR = 1.57), stroke (OR = 1.31), migraines (OR = 1.76), myasthenia gravis (OR = 2.85), RA (OR = 2.86), systemic lupus erythematosus (OR = 3.98), asthma (OR = 1.25), pulmonary circulation disorders (OR = 1.37), diabetes with complications (OR = 1.31), hypothyroidism (OR = 1.94), liver diseases (OR = 1.71), peptic ulcers (OR = 1.76), hepatitis B (OR = 1.64), deficiency anaemias (OR = 1.31), depression (OR = 2.11), psychoses (OR = 1.87) and solid tumours without metastasis (OR = 1.41).

Conclusions:
This study demonstrates significantly higher prevalence of medical comorbidities in patients with dry eye disease in Taiwan