Abstract
Purpose :
To investigate the effect of low dose atropine eye drops on retinal responses to clear and blurred images in a group of young adults with emmetropia or myopia.
Methods :
Dead-leaves pattern electroretinograms (DLPs) were recorded from N=30 young adults (24.7±1.6yrs) with emmetropia (+0.4±0.4D) or myopia (-2.0±1.3D) at two visits. Retinal responses were recorded while subjects viewed naturalistic images under three different conditions: (1) no blur (CLEAR), (2) convoluted to simulate Defocus blur (DEF, 0.5µm), or (3) to simulate Spherical Aberration (SA, 0.365µm) of equivalent perceptual magnitude, across the entire “dead leaves” naturalistic image. Optical biometry and open-field autorefractor were also measured. Subjects instilled 1 drop of 0.05% atropine in each eye every evening for 7 days. All measurements were taken: twice during Visit-1 (before and 30mins after instillation of atropine), and once during Visit-2 (1 week later, at the same time: ±2 hours). The Amplitude (AMP, µV) and Latency (LAT, ms) of the first peak (P1) and second negative trough (N2) were analyzed with repeated measures general linear models with pupil size change as a covariate.
Results :
Low dose atropine increased P1 AMP responses when DLPs were recorded using images blurred with DEF (F=3.46, P=0.04, mainly short-term: P<0.01) and SA (F=6.22, P<0.01, short- P<0.01 and long-term P=0.02), but did not affect recordings using CLEAR images (F=0.51, P=0.61). When refractive groups were considered separately, atropine increased the P1 AMP for DEF images only for MYOPs (F=11.17, P<0.01), with a trend also for SA also only in MYOPs (F=2.78, P=0.11). The effect of atropine in P1 AMP was not observed in EMMs. On the other hand, low dose atropine decreased P1 LAT (F=7.39, P<0.01) with CLEAR images, with no effect for blurred images. There were no effects on N2 AMP or LAT responses.
Conclusions :
Using 0.05% atropine eye drops significantly affected retinal responses. Amplitude responses were not affected for clear images but increased for blurred images in myopes. The results appear to represent retinal effects since the change in pupil size was considered and reduced accommodation caused by atropine eye drops would reduce, not increase amplitudes.
This abstract was presented at the 2023 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in New Orleans, LA, April 23-27, 2023.