Retinal Macular Volumes May Correlate with Serum VEGF Levels in Women with Severe Preeclampsia

Abstract

Purpose: To compare serum levels of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) between patients with severe preeclampsia (sPE) and normotensive postpartum controls using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), and to determine whether VEGF levels correlate with retinal macular volumes in patients with sPE using enhanced depth imaging spectral domain optical coherence tomography (EDI SD-OCT).

Methods: This incident case-control study examined 12 women with sPE and 5 women with normotensive pregnancies who were age-matched (mean age 33.6 years ± 7.5 SD and mean age 32.6 years ± 8.0 SD, respectively). Nineteen eyes of women with sPE were included in the imaging portion of the analysis. Exclusion criteria included chronic or gestational hypertension without proteinuria, and diabetes. All subjects were recruited in the immediate postpartum period and underwent EDI SD-OCT imaging as well as blood draw. Heidelberg Eye Explorer software was used to automate retinal macular volume measurements. ELISA was used to measure serum VEGF in picograms (pg/ml).

Results: Mean serum VEGF in sPE was 319.5 pg/ml and in normotensive postpartum controls was 160.5 pg/ml (P = 0.2401). Mean retinal macular volume in sPE was 8.82 mm3 and in controls was 8.42 mm3 (P = 0.0004). Amongst cases, retinal macular volumes correlated with serum VEGF levels with a Pearson’s correlation coefficient of R = 0.44 (P = 0.0594).

Conclusions: Our results support the hypotheses that VEGF levels are increased in sPE as compared with normotensive postpartum controls, and that systemic VEGF levels may correlate with retinal thickening in the setting of sPE. This study is limited by the small number of subjects.

Keywords: 748 vascular endothelial growth factor • 552 imaging methods (CT, FA, ICG, MRI, OCT, RTA, SLO, ultrasound) • 688 retina