Despite intensive research, the precise etiology of age-related maculopathy (ARM) is poorly understood, and treatment options for this devastating eye disease are limited. Although some factors related to cerebrovascular or cardiovascular diseases, including smoking, alcohol and hypertension, also have been identified as risk factors for ARM, the interactions among these suspected risk factors with aging have not been fully investigated. Furthermore, since ARM is a complex disease, multifactors are likely to associate with its development. The Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study was a population-based longitudinal study conducted between 1986 and 1999 in four U.S. communities to investigate the etiology and natural history of atherosclerosis. Retinal photographic images were obtained during the third visit (from 1993 to 1995) and graded. A high prevalence of ARM was observed in the population (5.6% in whites and 3.7% in blacks), providing a sufficient number of cases for risk factor analyses. Extensive individual-level information on potential risk factors is available in ARIC public domain data, including socioeconomic status, medication use, lifestyle factors, and quantitative measures of lipid, hematology, hemostasis and chemistry. We propose to employ a newly developed computer-based data mining technique to perform a secondary analysis on the data derived from ARIC, evaluating characteristics of approximately 600 ARM cases and 12,000 control individuals free from ARM at the time of retinal evaluation.
Specific aims are 1) to explore the relationships between ARM and all the potential risk/protective factors for which data were collected in the ARIC study and 2) to investigate the interactions between the factors identified by aim 1 and aging in ARM. Our goal is to generate new hypotheses for further research on ARM. ? ?
