Diabetes & metabolic syndromeAug 11, 2024

Glucagon-like peptide-1 drugs and risk of serious eye disease in Taiwanese people

GLP-1 Therapies Weekly Brief ↗PubMed ↗DOI ↗

Updated Mar 31, 2026

Abstract

In a study involving 27,506 matched pairs, GLP-1 receptor agonist use was not linked to a higher risk of vision-threatening retinopathy compared to non-use.

GLP-1 receptor agonist use did not show an increased risk of vision-threatening retinopathy compared to non-use (adjusted hazard ratio 0.96).
Users of GLP-1 receptor agonists had a significantly lower risk of vision-threatening retinopathy compared to those using dipeptidyl peptidase-4 inhibitors (adjusted hazard ratio 0.8).
There was no significant difference in the risk of vision-threatening retinopathy between GLP-1 receptor agonist users and those using sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 inhibitors (adjusted hazard ratio 1.09).
GLP-1 receptor agonist use also did not show a significant difference in risk compared to sulfonylurea users (adjusted hazard ratio 0.79).

Simplified

AIMS: To compare the risk of vision-threatening retinopathy between glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1 RA) use and no use in patients with type 2 diabetes.

METHODS: Using propensity score matching, we identified 27,506 pairs of GLP-1 RA users and non-users, 3904 pairs of GLP-1 RA and dipeptidyl peptidase-4 inhibitors (DPP-4i) users, 10,985 pairs of GLP-1 RA and sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 inhibitors (SGLT2i) users, 2542 pairs of GLP-1 RA and sulfonylurea, respectively, from Taiwan's National Health Insurance Research Database from January 1, 2009 to December 31, 2018. We used Cox proportional hazards models to compare the risk of vision-threatening retinopathy between GLP-1 RA use and other matched groups.

RESULTS: In the matched cohorts, the time-varying exposure analysis showed that GLP-1 RA use was not associated with an increased risk of vision-threatening retinopathy compared to GLP-1 RA non-use (aHR 0.96, 95 % CI 0.89-1.03). New-user and active-comparator analyses showed that GLP-1 RA was associated with a significantly lower risk of vision-threatening retinopathy than DPP-4i (aHR 0.8, 95 % CI 0.66-0.97) but had no significant association with this risk compared to SGLT2i (aHR 1.09, 95 % CI 0.96-1.24) or sulfonylureas (aHR 0.79, 95 % CI 0.49-1.06).

CONCLUSIONS: This nationwide cohort study showed that GLP-1 RA use was not associated with an increased risk of vision-threatening retinopathy compared to non- GLP-1 RA use, and GLP-1 RA could significantly lower the risk of vision-threatening retinopathy than DPP-4i.

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Competing interests

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Chii-Min Hwu reports was provided by Taipei Veterans General Hospital. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

PubMed

Glucagon-like peptide-1 drugs and risk of serious eye disease in Taiwanese people

Abstract

Full Text

Funding

Competing interests

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Abstract

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