Abstract
Purpose :
The significance of the choroid includes nourishing outer retinal layers, regulating temperature and intraocular pressure, being involved in the pathogenesis of many blindness-leading diseases such as age-related macular degeneration, polypoidal choroidal vasculopathy, Vogt-Koyanagi-Harada Disease, and myopic retinopathy. However, there is a paucity of data on choroidal thickness in children, in addition, most of the studies on children were hospital based and with a relatively small sample size, leading to a potential selection bias. The main purpose of current study is to investigate the choroidal thickness and its associations in children in a school-based study.
Methods :
The Gobi Desert Children Eye Study is a cross-sectional school based study, which included 1565 out of 1911(81.9%)eligible children from all schools in the oasis region of Ejina. A detailed ophthalmic examination was performed, including spectral-domain optical coherence tomography with enhanced depth imaging for measurements of choroidal thickness.
Results :
The choroidal thickness measurements were available for 1463 students (93.5%) with a mean age of 11.8 ± 3.5 years (range 7-21 years). The mean subfoveal choroidal thickness was 282 ± 49 μm and 281 ± 51μm for right and left eyes respectively. The inter-eye difference was not significant (P=0.80). Among the five locations measured for each eye, the thickest choroid located at 1000μm temporal to the fovea, then from thicker to thinner it was the sub fovea, 2500μm temporal to the fovea, 1000μm nasal to the fovea and 2500μm nasal to the fovea. The mean subfoveal choroidal thickness increased with age from 288 μm at 7 years old to 304 μm at 11 years old then starting to decrease with age from 298 μm at 12 years old to 258 μm at 18+ years old. In multivariate analysis, a thicker subfoveal choroidal thickness was significantly associated with younger age and higher spherical equivalent of refractive errors. It was not significantly associated with the body mass index, ethnicity and ocular perfusion pressure.
Conclusions :
The subfoveal choroidal thickness in Ejina school children was on average 282 ± 49 μm, which increased with age until 11 years old, then starting to decreased with age. A thicker subfoveal choroidal thickness was significantly associated with a higher spherical equivalent refractive error after adjusting for age.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2016 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Seattle, Wash., May 1-5, 2016.