Abstract
Purpose :
There was no non-invasive way to estimate the progression of diabetic retinopathy (DR), which is considered as the low-grade chronic inflammatory disease. We tested the hypothesis that spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) could detect more inflammatory cells in vitreous of eyes with severe DR.
Methods :
Medical charts of 932 eyes of 466 patients who took SD-OCT between September 2012 and December 2014 were retrospectively reviewed. Horizontal and vertical images of the macular with a 30-degree angle of view were recorded for each eye and assessed the number of hyperreflective foci seen in the vitreous by using the SD-OCT. Exclusion criteria were laser therapy, previous surgical intervation, intravitreal antivascular endothelial growth factor or steroid treatment, retinal disease, ocular trauma, vitreous hemorrhage, asteroid hyalosis, posterior vitreous detachment and poor quality of images. Grading of Retinopathy was done according to the International Clinical Disease Severity Scale for Diabetic Retinopathy. One-way analysis variance with posttest Bonferroni multiple comparison was used to compare means.
Results :
Of 932 eyes, 79 eyes of control and 130 eyes of diabetic patients met the inclusion criteria of this study. Of 130 eyes of diabetic patients, 45 eyes are of no apparent retinopathy (none), 17 eyes are of mild non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy (mild), 33 eyes are of moderate non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy (moderate), 24 eyes are of severe non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy (severe) and 11 eyes are of proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR: proliferative). The average number of hyperreflective foci seen on SD-OCT was 0.956±1.03 in none, 4.18±1.89 in mild, 7.27±2.93 in moderate, 11.00±5.92 in severe, 41.73±32.95 in proliferation and 0.975±1.25 in control. As the severity of the diabetes proceeds from none to proliferation, the number of hyperrefrective foci increased significantly and the P value was 1.0, 1.0, 3.4×10-3, 4.0×10-6, 1.5×10-35 for none, mild, moderate, severe, and PDR, respectively, when compared with control.
Conclusions :
The number of hyperreflective foci, which are consistent with inflammatory cells, increased with the severity of DR. These findings suggest that increasing number of hypereflective foci seen on SD-OCT during follow-up visits could be a sign for DR progression.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2016 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Seattle, Wash., May 1-5, 2016.