Abstract
Purpose :
To examine the relationship between retinal volumetric blood flow and both systemic blood pressure (BP) and ocular perfusion pressure (OPP) in open-angle glaucoma (OAG) patients with and without diabetes mellitus (DM)
Methods :
120 patients with OAG (19 with DM, 91 without DM) were assessed for systemic BP and OPP and for volumetric blood flow in the retinal vessels by Doppler Fourier-domain optical coherence tomography. Pearson correlations were used to test for associations between measurements, with p<0.05 considered statistically significant.
Results :
In OAG patients, the superior hemisphere blood flow (microliters/min) was 16.45 (standard error: 1.38) and 17.68 (0.58) in patients with and without DM, respectively. In OAG patients with DM, superior hemisphere blood flow was positively correlated with diastolic BP (DBP) (r=0.53, p=0.019), mean arterial pressure (MAP) (r=0.50, p=0.027), OPP (r=0.45, p=0.054), diastolic perfusion pressure (DPP) (r=0.49, p=0.032) and mean perfusion pressure (MPP) (r=0.47, p=0.041). In OAG patients without DM, these correlations were weak and non-significant (r=-0.12 to -0.02, all p>0.05); leading to a significant difference between groups (DBP: p=0.022; MAP: p=0.031; OPP: p=0.025; DPP: p=0.018; MPP: p=0.024).
Conclusions :
In this group of OAG patients, systemic BP and OPP were positively correlated with volumetric blood flow in the superior retinal hemisphere only in diabetics. These results suggest that systemic blood and ocular perfusion pressures have a larger influence on retinal blood flow in diabetic patients compared to those without diabetes, possibly due to a lack of localized autoregulation.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2016 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Seattle, Wash., May 1-5, 2016.