Impact of death/preservation interval, cause of death and age on donor corneal endothelial cell density

Abstract

Purpose : There are controversies regarding the influence of the cause of death, donor age and death/preservation interval in the quality of the donor cornea. A cross sectional study was performed to evaluate if these factors have any influence in the Endothelial Cell Count (ECC) of the donor cornea.

Methods : 869 eyes from 495 records (255 males, 49.7 ±15.9 years old) from January 2013 and December 2016 of Santa Casa de Misericordia de Sao Paulo Eye Bank were analyzed. For exclusion criteria, incomplete records, absence of Corneal Specular Microscope (CSMe) data, preservation interval after 12hrs was excluded from this study. CSMe data from each eye was plotted and submitted to Pearsons correlation coefficient to analyze the correlation between age and death/preservation interval. Cause of death and ECC was pictured in a box-plot analysis. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was used to analyze differences between preservation time and age means. All data presented followed a Gaussian distribution.

Results : ECC did not show correlation between death/preservation interval (0.04) and showed weak correlation between age and ECC (0.43).
No significant difference was found comparing causes of death and ECC, except for trauma (average EEC 2668 ±430.16 in trauma, against 2569 ±437.28 in all causes of death), in which most trauma deaths occur in younger patients (average 40.8 years old against 49.7 years old in the all causes of death group).

Conclusions : No correlation was observed between ECC and death/preservation interval of the donor cornea. Data analyzed also failed to demonstrate correlation between cause of death and ECC. The only factor which demonstrated influence in the ECC was the donor age.

This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2018 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Honolulu, Hawaii, April 29 - May 3, 2018.