Abstract
Purpose :
Patients with diabetes mellitus are known to have high levels of advanced glycation end products (AGEs) in the vitreous body and blood. This study aimed to examine the fluorescence ratio (FR) in diabetic patients, using CLEARPATH DS-120 (Freedom Meditech) to noninvasively determine lens FR, which reflects AGE levels.
Methods :
Seventy-eight patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (the DM group) and 40 non-diabetic patients (the non-DM group, age-matched control), who visited the Department of Ophthalmology, Shinshu University School of Medicine between July and November 2015, were enrolled. We confirmed the diagnosis of diabetes mellitus and determined FR according to the international clinical diabetic retinopathy disease severity scale. Diabetic retinopathy (DR) was classified as follows: no apparent retinopathy (no DR), mild non-proliferative DR (mild NPDR), moderate NPDR, severe NPDR, and proliferative DR (PDR).
Results :
There was no significant difference in age between the non-DM (61 ± 17 years) and DM (63 ± 13 years) groups (p=0.5790). The FR was significantly higher in the DM (0.31 ± 0.06) than in the non-DM (0.20 ± 0.06, p<0.0001) group. In terms of the severity scale, there was no significant difference in FR between the non-DM group (0.20 ± 0.06) and either the no DR (0.22 ± 0.04, p>0.9999) or the mild NPDR (0.27 ± 0.05, p=0.4090) cases in the DM group, but the FRs of the moderate NPDR (0.32 ± 0.07, p=0.0295), severe NPDR (0.32 ± 0.06, p<0.0001) and PDR (0.36 ± 0.05, p<0.0001) cases in the DM group were significantly higher than that in the non-DM group.
Conclusions :
Our observations suggest that the FR, which reflects AGE levels, may serve as a good indicator for diagnosing DM and for evaluating retinopathy.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2016 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Seattle, Wash., May 1-5, 2016.