Abstract
Purpose :
Treatment of diabetic maculopathy by intravitreal injection of VEGF-inhibitors is not effective in all patients, and therefore parameters should be identified for predicting the visual outcome after anti-VEGF treatment of the disease. It has previously been shown that fixational saccades are increased in patients with reduced visual acuity secondary to diabetic maculopathy, but it is unknown to what extent these saccades in an eye affected by diabetic maculopathy are influenced by the other eye during binocular fixation.
Methods :
In fifty-nine eyes from 30 diabetic patients with clinically significant macular oedema, fixational eye movements were recorded using the iView X™ video based eye tracker during monocular and binocular fixation.
Results :
Fixational saccades during monocular fixation had a significantly higher frequency (p=0.008), a larger amplitude (p=0.02), and involved a larger retinal area (p=0.01) than during binocular fixation. There was a significant negative correlation (r2=0.21, p=0.01) between visual acuity and the area of fixation during monocular fixation whereas this correlation disappeared during binocular fixation (r2=0.004, p=0.74).
Conclusions :
Binocular fixation reduces the area of fixation and the amplitude of fixational saccades in the most severely affected eye in patients with diabetic maculopathy. Studies of pathological changes of fixational saccades in diabetic maculopathy should be performed using monocular fixation.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2017 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Baltimore, MD, May 7-11, 2017.