Abstract
Purpose :
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a retinal disease that can cause vision loss and blindness in people who have diabetes. Further development of diagnostic testing is of interest to provide objective and functional assessment of the disease to better guide treatment and monitor disease progression. This study investigated the diagnostic accuracy of retinal dysfunction and frequency domain parameters of the Diopsys flicker full-field electroretinogram (ff-ERG) in non-proliferative (NP) and proliferative (P) diabetic retinopathy (DR).
Methods :
This retrospective study analyzed data from 133 subjects (259 eyes) who had previously undergone bilateral ff-ERGtesting. All eyes were categorized by DR severity. Different frequency domain parameters (magnitude and phase) were compared between study groups. A one-way Welch ANOVA and Games-Howell post hoc analysis was conducted.
Results :
Statistically significant reductions in flicker ff-ERG magnitude and phase values were observed dependent on disease severity (i.e., a continuous reduction from control to mild NPDR, moderate NPDR, severe NPDR, and PDR) (Magnitude: F (4, 71.935) = 30.293, p < 0.0005; Phase: F (4, 72.253) = 48.512, p < 0.0005). Additional between group comparisons by disease severity were observed with significant effect in both magnitude and phase parameters (p < 0.01). Flicker ff-ERG phase parameter (AUC range: 0.791-0.908, p < 0.0005) showed the highest AUC values when compared with magnitude (AUC range: 0.613-0.762, p = 0.005) for the detection of DR.
Conclusions :
Flicker ff-ERG signal analysis in frequency domain showed that magnitude and phase parameters present accurate diagnostics of DR by severity stage. Phase and magnitude parameters represent ischemic index and a measure of retinal structural damage, respectively.
This abstract was presented at the 2023 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in New Orleans, LA, April 23-27, 2023.