Blue light-filtering intraocular implants do not influence insomnia

For individuals who underwent cataract surgery, the use of blue light-filtering intraocular lenses (BF-IOL) does not appear to reduce the incidence of insomnia, a study reports.

The study used data from the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database and included 171,415 patients who underwent cataract surgery in both eyes. Researchers applied propensity score matching (PSM) to balance the baseline characteristics between patients who used BF-IOL or non-BF-IOL.

Overall, 19,604 (11.4 percent) patients had BF-IOL implants and 151,811 (88.6 percent) had non-BF-IOL. Patients in the BF-IOL group were more likely to be younger and have fewer chronic diseases.

The incidence rates of insomnia during a mean follow-up period of 6.2 years were 2.97 per 100 person-years in the BF-IOL group and 3.21 per 100 person-years in the non-BF-IOL group. In Cox and cause-specific hazard models, the between-group difference in the incidence rate of insomnia was not significant after treating all-cause mortality as a competing risk (subdistribution hazard ratio, 0.98, 95 percent confidence interval [CI], 0.95–1.01) and after PSM (hazard ratio, 0.97, 95 percent CI, 0.92–1.01).

On further analysis, the insomnia rate between the two IOL groups remained comparable in subgroups defined by age, sex, and the presence of benign prostatic hyperplasia in men.