Hospitalization characteristics of patients with glaucoma in Central and West Serbia

Introduction/Objective. Glaucoma is a chronic disease that impairs the optic nerve irreversibly and can lead to serious loss of vision and blindness. As the most frequent out of all, primary open-angle glaucoma has a worldwide incidence of 2.4 million. The objective of this article is to examine the characteristics of glaucoma hospitalization patterns in Central and West Serbia in the 2006–2017 period. Methods. This study was a retrospective analysis of glaucoma hospitalizations in the Kragujevac Clinical Center from 2006 to 2017 (n = 1,751). All hospitalizations were divided according to discharge diagnoses into the following three subgroups: primary open-angle glaucoma, the primary closure glaucoma, and secondary glaucoma and other glaucoma types. Results. The average hospitalization rate for glaucoma is 5/10,000 inhabitants. The lowest rate was recorded in 2013 (1.8/10,000) and the highest in 2015 (9.3/10,000). The rehospitalization rate ranged from 0.5/10,000 in 2013 to 6.9/10,000 in 2015, with an average of 2.4 patients per 10,000. The most common glaucoma was secondary glaucoma and other glaucoma types (44.6%), followed by primary open-angle glaucoma (37.9%) and primary closure glaucoma (17.5%). The average hospitalization length was 6.5 ± 4.9 days and it decreased from the average 9.7 ± 6.5 (2006) to 5.5 ± 3.7 days (2013) (p < 0.01) in all glaucoma types. Conclusion. There was a significant reduction of the hospitalization length in all glaucoma types in Central and West Serbia. The hospitalization rates varied with a significant increase since 2013, which is the consequence of the increase in rehospitalization rates.