Abstract
Purpose :
There is limited information about the presence of a suprachoroidal space in man and the extent to which it is open or closed in the healthy eye. It is of interest for the utilization of the suprachoroidal space for drug delivery to find out whether it is a constant or fluctuating feature and whether the lack of a visible suprachoroidal space on optical coherence tomography (OCT) scans means that it cannot be opened in response to disease or injection of fluid. We have investigated its presence on OCT in healthy 11-12-year-old children.
Methods :
250 children from the Copenhagen Child Cohort 2000 Study were randomly selected for inclusion. None had a history of ophthalmological disease and all had best corrected visual acuity of 80 ETDRS letters or better. Six were excluded due to missing OCT scans. A fovea-centered, seven-line horizontal set of enhanced-depth imaging scans, 30 by 5 degrees set 240 µm apart, was used for evaluation. Presence of a suprachoroidal space was registered when a hyporeflective line was seen to demarcate the transition between the choroid and the sclera over a distance of minimum 500 µm (Fig). The space should be visible over at least two adjacent lines. Each eye of a given individual was assessed independently twice in random order by the same grader. To provide a reference from an older age group, OCT scans from 101 patients from a medical retina clinic were also reviewed.
Results :
In the 11-12-year-old children, 5.7 (CI95 2.8 - 8.7) % of right eyes and 4.9 (CI95 2.2 - 7.7) % of left eyes had a suprachoroidal space, 8.2 (CI95 4.7 - 11.7) % of the children had a suprachoroidal space in at least one eye and 2.5 (CI95 0.5 – 4.4) % in both eyes. The spaces appeared as pockets rather than continuous spaces and 77 % were seen temporal of the fovea. Intragrader kappa values were 0.73 in left eyes and 0.77 in right eyes. The medical retina patients had a mean age of 59.2 (SD±16.0) years and 71.3 % of the patients showed a suprachoroidal space in at least one eye.
Conclusions :
An open suprachoroidal space on enhanced-depth imaging OCT is a rare finding in healthy children occurring in only 8.2 % of subjects and mostly in the form of pockets rather than continuous spaces. This is in striking contrast to a suprachoroidal space being visible in the majority of adult patients from a medical retinal clinic.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2017 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Baltimore, MD, May 7-11, 2017.