Sometimes, it’s Weird

In the June 2023 edition of the journal Ophthalmology, Rajvi Mehta and colleagues published a study about diet and glaucoma.

Their study placed patients in two groups: low-fat diet or usual diet. The outcome measure they looked at was incidence of open angle glaucoma (the more common from of glaucoma compared to closed angle glaucoma). All of their participants were women. Surprisingly, they found that those who had the lowest calories from fat before engaging in their low-fat diet had increased risk of developing open angle glaucoma. In other words, if they already had lower fat diets, trying to further work toward low-fat diet modification increased the glaucoma risk.

Too much of a good thing? There is certainly no recommendation to increase fat intake from this study. It would probably take a lot more evidence to get something actionable out of the association found in the study. But in medicine, there are often unexpected results that do, in fact, represent reality. Sometimes, it’s weird.