Abstract
Purpose:
To investigate the choroidal thickness in patients with branch retinal vein occlusion (BRVO).
Methods:
We examined the bilateral subfoveal choroidal thickness using enhanced depth imaging optical coherence tomography (EDI-OCT) in 50 eyes of 50 patients (mean age 64.3±10.3 years, 23 females and 27 males) with BRVO. Macular edema was evaluated by using spectral domain OCT (RTVue®). Patients were excluded if they had other ocular disease or had no macular edema (<300μm) or the duration of the BRVO was long (>3 months). Thirty-two of 50 eyes patients were treated with intravitreal bevacizumab (IVB) (1.25mg/0.05ml) and measured the subfoveal choroidal thicknesses before and after the treatment.
Results:
The mean central macular thickness of BRVO eyes was 514.8±116.3μm. The mean subfoveal choroidal thickness was 263.5±79.1μm and 241.2±72.6μm in BRVO eyes and fellow eyes, respectively. There was no significant difference in the choroidal thickness between BRVO eyes and fellow eyes (p=0.078). There was no correlation between central macular thickness and subfoveal choroidal thickness. The mean subfoveal choroidal thickness after IVB was 239.7±69.3μm, which was not significant change compared with the mean subfoveal choroidal thickness before IVB.
Conclusions:
There was no significant difference between the subfoveal choroidal thickness of BRVO eyes and fellow eyes. Because the subfoveal choroidal thickness of BRVO did not change significantly after IVB, it is speculated that blockade of vascular endothelial growth factor may have little influences on subfoveal choroidal thickness in BRVO eyes.