Abstract
Purpose :
To investigate if there are differences in the retinal oxygen saturation between primary open-angle glaucoma (POAG) and normal-tension glaucoma (NTG) patients.
Methods :
This study enrolled POAG and NTG patients exhibiting differences between the upper and lower total deviation (TD) that were either more than 10 or less than 5 dB. Retinal oxygen saturation measurements in these glaucoma patients were performed by a noninvasive spectrophotometric retinal oximeter. A Student’s t-test was used for the statistical analysis.
Results :
Evaluations of the worse and better hemifields in the POAG patients who exhibited differences in the upper and lower hemifield TD that were less than 5 dB (n = 25) showed that there were no statistically significant differences for the retinal venous saturation of oxygen (SaO2) in the venous vessels. However, there was a higher mean SaO2 in the worse (57.0 ± 7.5%) versus the better (54.3 ± 7.0%) hemifield in the NTG patients (n = 22; P = 0.007). Evaluations of the patients with more than a 10 dB difference in the upper and lower hemifield TD showed there were statistically significant differences for the retinal venous SaO2 in the venous vessels between the POAG (n = 19) and the NTG (n = 26) patients.
Conclusions :
POAG and NTG patients exhibited a difference in the oxygen saturation of the retinal vessels, which may indicate the existence of a different pathology for POAG and NTG.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2017 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Baltimore, MD, May 7-11, 2017.