Abstract
Purpose :
To evaluate the association between macular thickness and glaucoma and to quantify the predictive ability using the UK Biobank cohort.
Methods :
We conducted this study using 51,067 participants of European ancestry from the UK Biobank cohort. All study subjects were 40 years of age and older. Spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) images of each eye were obtained using the Topcon 3D OCT-1000 (Topcon Corporation, Tokyo, Japan). Analyses of the images were performed using the Topcon OCT image analysis software. After removing outliers and low quality images, the average macular thickness of both eyes was used for downstream analysis. Participants self-reported their glaucoma status. We used logistic regression analyses to examine the association between glaucoma and macular thickness controlling for other covariates, such as age, sex, intraocular pressure, body mass index, systolic blood pressure, diabetes, and spherical power. To quantify the discrimination of macular thickness on glaucoma, we used the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC).
Results :
Macular thickness was significantly associated with glaucoma, indicating that those with a thinner macula had higher odds of developing glaucoma after adjusting for covariates (OR = 0.966; P = 1.0 x 10-43). Participants in the lowest quintile of macular thickness were 2.77 times (P = 2.3 x 10-31) more likely to have glaucoma than those in the top quintile. Macular thickness increased the prediction accuracy for glaucoma (AUC increased by 2.2%; P = 5.8 x 10-10) when controlled for other covariates. The model including macular thickness was a better fitting model compared to the model without macular thickness (P < 0.0001).
Conclusions :
Using large-scale biobank data, we identified a significant association between macular thickness and glaucoma and observed that macular thickness improves the predictability of glaucoma.
This abstract was presented at the 2019 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Vancouver, Canada, April 28 - May 2, 2019.