Interview with Marie Louise Lyster, medical student from University of Southern Denmark in Odense

My name is Marie Louise Lyster. I am a 26-year-old medical student from University of Southern Denmark in Odense, graduating in January 2022. In the beginning of 2021, I started working on my research project about risk of eye diseases in OI as my master’s project with my supervisor, Lars Folkestad, MD. Together with the rest of the team we published the article in Bone in November. This was my first time working with an OI related topic and I found it very interesting!

 Who was behind your project?

I did the formal analysis, visualization, writing of original draft, editing and review with help and guidance from my supervisor, Lars Folkestad, who also did the investigation, funding acquisition and conceptualization. Jannie Dahl Hald, Malin Lundberg Rasmussen, and Jakob Grauslund helped with review, editing and conceptualization. The study is a nationwide register-based open cohort study based on data from The Danish National Patient Register. We included all patients registered with an ICD-8 or ICD-10 code for OI between 1st of January 1977 and 31st of December 2018.

Each OI patient was matched with 5 reference individuals. A list of different eye diseases related to parts of the eye rich in collagen I were included, and we compared the risk of each eye disease between the OI cohort and the reference population.

Funding sources were Odense University Hospital, Free Research Fond, Region of Southern Denmark, Grant for continued clinical research and Jascha Fonden, Research Grant.

What was your research project about?

Our project is about risk of eye diseases in OI. Collagen I plays an important role and is an essential structural component in different compartments of the eye. Due to the qualitative defects in collagen I in OI we hypothesized that patients with OI are likely to have an increased risk of ocular diseases related to parts of the eye rich in collagen I.

What were your most interesting findings? 

Our results showed an increased risk of eye diseases in OI compared to the general population. We also found that most of the included eye diseases were diagnosed at an earlier age in patients with OI compared to the reference population. It is possible that eye diseases are discovered sooner and more frequent in OI patients due to specialist follow-up and care (surveillance bias). Our results indicated some degree of surveillance bias, however, the effects on the risk estimates were negligible.

What is the take home message for clinical work?

There is an important ocular aspect of OI. Some of the included eye diseases can potentially be sight threatening. Thus, regular examinations by ophthalmologists could be considered to detect these diseases at an earlier age in OI patients. It is necessary with further research to understand the role and severity of eye diseases in OI.

This article was first featured in OIFE Magazine 4-2021.