Is choroidal thickness different between glaucoma patients and healthy subjects?

Abstract

Purpose The aim of our study was to evaluate and compare choroidal thickness (CT) of healthy subjects and primary open‐angle glaucoma patients with spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD‐OCT) and to seek a correlation between CT and glaucoma severity. Methods Sixty‐five healthy eyes, 27 eyes with early glaucoma , 21 eyes with moderate glaucoma and 30 eyes with advanced glaucoma were included in this cross‐sectional study (one eye per patient). Retro‐foveolar CT, foveolar retinal thickness and average retinal nerve fiber layer thickness (RNFL) were measured by SD‐OCT. Humphrey 24‐2 visual field was also performed and mean defect (MD)recorded. Spherical equivalent (SE) was measured with automatic refractometer. Results Average retro‐foveolar CT was statistically lower in glaucoma patients than in healthy subjects p=0.0023. The CT was not different according to glaucoma stage (p=0.078). We found a statistically significant correlation between CT and MD (p = 0.040), but not with CT and age (p=0.053), CT and retinal foveolar thickness (p=0,789), CT and RNFL thickness (p=0.732) and CT and SE (p=0.202). Conclusion This preliminary study showed that retro‐foveolar CT measured by SD‐OCT was significantly thinner in glaucomatous patients than in healthy subjects.

Exact Surface Registration of Retinal Surfaces From 3-D Optical Coherence Tomography Images

“…Averaging this many measurements over a relatively few number of regions could significantly undermine the bias-variance tradeoff used in subsequent analysis and even produce inconsistent results, with some researchers reporting no significant change [7] in averaged choroidal thickness, while others finding significantly different measurements [6] in choroidal thickness between healthy and glaucomatous subjects. This motivates the need to develop tools that can transfer measurements for subsequent statistical analysis to a central template (or geometrically aligned surfaces) on a vertex-to-vertex basis, without having to resort to averaging data in local regions.…”

“…While it is well established that mean NFL thickness is lower in glaucomatous subjects, it has only recently been proposed [6], [7] that choroidal thickness, a measure of separation between Bruch's membrane (BM) and choroid, could also serve as a biomarker for glaucoma.…”