Background: To investigate the effect of diabetes on the biomechanical behavior of the optic nerve head (ONH) and the peripapillary sclera (ppSc) in streptozocine-induced diabetic rats. Methods: Diabetes mellitus was induced in 20 Wistar rats using streptozocine. Twenty-five nondiabetic rats served as controls. Eyes were enucleated after 12 weeks and 2 strips of one eye were prepared containing ONH or ppSc. The stress-strain relation was measured in the stress range of 0.05–10 MPa using a biomaterial tester. Results: At 5% strain the stress of the ONH in diabetic rats was 897 ± 295 kPa and in the control group it was 671 ± 246 kPa; there was a significant difference between both groups (p = 0.011). The stress of the diabetic ppSc (574 ± 185 kPa) increased compared to that of the nondiabetic ppSc (477 ± 171 kPa), but this did not reach statistical significance (p = 0.174). The calculated tangent modulus at 5% strain was 11.79 MPa in the diabetic ONH and 8.77 MPa in the nondiabetic ONH; there was a significant difference between both groups (p = 0.006). The calculated tangent modulus at 5% strain was 7.17 MPa in the diabetic ppSc and 6.12 MPa in the nondiabetic ppSc, without a statistically significant difference (p = 0.09). Conclusion: In contrast to the ppSc, the ONH of diabetic rats showed a significant increase in stiffness compared to nondiabetic rats, which might be explained by nonenzymatic collagen cross-linking mediated by advanced glycation end products due to high blood glucose levels in diabetes. Further studies are needed to investigate if these biomechanical changes represent a detrimental risk factor for intraocular pressure regulation in diabetic glaucoma patients.

ABSTRACT.Purpose: To investigate the effect of statins on ocular microcirculation in patients with hypercholesterolaemia.Methods: Ten patients with hypercholesterolaemia were included in this study. The diameter of retinal vessels was measured continuously with the retinal vessel analyser (RVA) before and 4 weeks after statin therapy. After baseline assessment, a monochromatic luminance flicker was applied to evoke retinal vasodilation. Flicker response was then analysed after 50, 150 and 250 seconds after baseline measurement. Additionally, cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein (HDL), low-density lipoprotein (LDL) and triglyceride levels were obtained to find a possible correlation between retinal vessel diameter changes and lipid metabolism before and after statin therapy.

Direct costs per visit were considerably higher than those reported in the Netherlands or the United Kingdom. If a health care provider decides to perform a glaucoma screening within this setting, the costs for the detection of a new case are EUR 7250 for definite POAG, EUR 4250 for early POAG, EUR 1450 for POAG suspect, EUR 5600 for OHT, EUR 2100 for glaucoma artefact case, and EUR 156 for a normal case.

Purpose: This study has two objectives. The first one is to investigate the question whether it is possible to discriminate between eyes with and without a glaucomateous visual field defect based on standard ophthalmologic examinations as well as optic nerve head topographic parameters. The second objective raises the question of the ability of several suggested statistical models to generalize their results to new, previously unseen patients.Methods: To investigate the above addressed question: (a) independent, two-sided t-tests, (b) a linear discriminant analysis with a forward stepwise variable selection algorithm, (c) four classification tree analyses and (d) three different neural network models with a forward, backward and a genetic variable selection algorithm were applied to 1020 subjects with a normal visual field and 110 subjects with a glaucomateous visual field defect. The Humphrey Visual Field Analyzer was used to test the visual fields and the TopSS w Scanning Laser Tomograph measured the optic nerve topography. A 10-fold cross-validation method was used for the models (b), (c) and (d) to compute approximative 95% confidence intervals for the specificity and sensitivity rates.A literature study of 18 studies dealt with the question whether/how the generalization error was controlled (control of sample bias, cross-validation procedures, training net size for valid generalization). It was also looked up whether point estimators or 95% confidence intervals were used to report specificity and sensitivity rates.Results: (a) Only few differences of the means could be found between both groups, including age, existing eye diseases, best corrected visual acuity and visual field parameters. The linear discriminant analysis (b), the classification tree analyses (c) and the neural networks (d) ended up with high specificity rates, but low sensitivity rates.The literature study showed that three models did not apply a cross-validation procedure to report their results. Two models used a test sample cross-validation and thirteen used a v-fold cross-validation method. Although most authors reported confidence intervals for the area under the ROC, no author reported confidence intervals for the true, but unknown sensitivity and specificity rates.Conclusions: (a) The results of this study suggest that the combination of standard ophthalmologic eye parameters and optic nerve head topographic parameters of the TopSS w instrument are not sufficient to discriminate properly among normal eyes and eyes with a glaucomateous visual field defect. (b) We follow important suggestions given in statistical learning theory for proper generalization and suggest to apply these methods to the given models or to models in future. At least three conditions should be met: (1) confidence intervals instead of point estimators to assess the classification performance of a model (control of test sample bias); (2) sensitivity and specificity rates should be estimated instead of reporting a point estimator for the area under the ROC and (3...

These projections provide an objective basis to estimate the resources that may be needed by health authorities and care providers such as ophthalmologists in the future and should help to design glaucoma blindness prevention programs or screening studies in Austria. The predicted continuous increase of Europe's older population will prove to become a challenge for public health professionals not only for diagnosis and monitoring, but also for the treatment of glaucoma.