Incidence of exudative age-related macular degeneration among elderly americans☆
Section snippets
Population and methods
Five years (1994–1998) of the 5% sample of Medicare medical claims data from the Standard Analytical File were used to develop a longitudinal study cohort. This file is prepared annually by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (formerly the Health Care Financing Administration), based on the last two digits of the beneficiary’s social security number. A period from 1994 to 1995 was defined as the “prebaseline” period, and a period from 1996 through 1998 as the study period. As is common
Results
A total of 1,041,009 Medicare beneficiaries met the enrollment criteria and were followed up in the study. As shown in Table 4, Degeneration by Age and Ascertainment Criteria No. at RiskDegenerationIncidenceLowerUpperNo. at RiskDegenerationIncidenceLowerUpper Level 2Level 3 No. at RiskNo. with Wet Age-related Macular DegenerationIncidence %95% Confidence IntervalNo. at RiskNo. with Wet Age-related Macular DegenerationIncidence %95% Confidence Interval LowerUpperLowerUpper
Discussion
Overall, the results obtained in this study are consistent with previous studies of AMD incidence in local populations and suggest that those findings are generalizable to the rest of the United States population. Given the potential biases and limitations inherent in the use of claims data for estimating incidence, the most striking finding of this study may be how close the claims data-derived estimates are to those estimates derived using precise, validated epidemiologic techniques. The
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Dr. Ronald Klein and the other investigators of the Beaver Dam Eye Study for assistance with this manuscript. The Beaver Dam Eye Study was supported by the National Eye Institute (grant no.: EY06594).
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Supported by Pharmacia Corp., which has a proprietary interest in the development of treatments for age-related macular degeneration.