The Impact of Donor History of Sleep Apnea on Corneal Tissue Evaluation Parameters.

Purpose: The goal of this study was to explore whether the donor history of sleep apnea affects corneal tissue evaluation parameters.

Methods: This was a retrospective study assessing the impact of donor history of sleep apnea in a dataset obtained from the Eversight Eye Bank. Comparative analysis and multivariate regression were used to assess differences in key parameters including endothelial cell density (ECD) and central corneal thickness.

Results: Data analyzed consisted of 50,170 tissues from 25,399 donors with no history of sleep apnea and 5473 tissues from 2774 donors with a history of sleep apnea. Tissue from donors with a history of sleep apnea showed lower ECD than those from donors with no history of sleep apnea (-51 cells/mm 2 , P < 0.001). Multivariate linear regression demonstrated that history of sleep apnea was a predictor of lower ECD by 13.72 cells/mm 2 ( P = 0.0264). Secondary analysis demonstrated that underweight and obese body mass indexes were significant predictors of increased ECD in donors with no history of sleep apnea ( P < 0.0001, P = 0.025, respectively). Body mass index category was not a significant predictor of ECD in donors with a history of sleep apnea. In a smaller subset of 10,756 tissues, sleep apnea was not a significant predictor of central corneal thickness.

Conclusions: This is the first study to demonstrate that a donor's history of sleep apnea is associated with a lower ECD in a large eye bank dataset. Future studies are needed to investigate whether history of sleep apnea affects posttransplantation outcomes.