Abstract
Purpose :
Central corneal thickness increases significantly the day after cataract surgery due to edema, but returns to baseline between 1 week and 1 month post operation. The increased thickness is directly related to corneal edema and endothelial cell loss. Moreover, it is well-known that there is a 9% endothelial cell loss after uneventful cataract surgery. Herein, our aim is to analyze histopathological corneal changes after cataract surgery.
Methods :
A total of 41 donor eyes (15 phakic and 26 pseudophakic) with clinical data, including age and sex, were stained with Masson’s Trichome and digitized using the Aperio AT digital scanner. Two measurements of the central corneal thickness (CT) and two peripheral thickness measurements (PT; 1500 µm anterior to Schwalbe’s line) from each eye were determined using an image analyzer (Imagescope). The mean central and peripheral thickness and standard deviation of both measurements were obtained. In addition, all endothelial cells in each sample were counted using an automated image analyzer algorithm.
Results :
In the phakic group, the mean age was 57.5 years (±16.0) and 53.3% were male. The mean CT and PT was 805.4µm (±74.8) and 986.9 µm (±59.3), respectively. In the pseudophakic group, the mean age was 77.2 years (±11.2) and 76.9% were male. The mean CT and PT was 794.4 µm (±82.9) and 978.6 µm (±86.9), respectively. No significant differences between the two groups with respect to CT and PT thickness were seen (P= 0.66 and 0.72, respectively). However, significantly fewer endothelial cells were present in the cataract surgery group (P=0.03)
Conclusions :
The mean corneal thickness observed in the present study is larger than what is reported by in vivo studies; this is likely explained by postmortem artifacts. Nevertheless, no significant histopathological changes in corneal thickness were observed between normal and cataract groups. However, a decrease in endothelial cells in the cataract surgery group was determined using a novel endothelial cell counting algorithm. These results support the data from other studies that only count central endothelial cells and opens a new frontier in the histopathological analysis of endothelial cells following cataract surgery
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2016 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Seattle, Wash., May 1-5, 2016.