Original ArticleNormal Age-Related Decay of Retinal Nerve Fiber Layer Thickness
Section snippets
Patients and Methods
The study was conducted on consecutive patients attending the outpatient services of the L. V. Prasad Eye Institute from July 2004 to February 2006 who satisfied the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The study protocol was approved by the ethics committee of the L. V. Prasad Eye Institute, Hyderabad. The methods applied in the study adhered to the tenets of the Declaration of Helsinki for the use of human subjects in biomedical research.
All the subjects underwent complete ophthalmic
Results
A total of 201 eyes (201 subjects) were evaluated; 14 eyes were excluded because of poor image quality on OCT. One hundred eighty-seven eyes of 187 normal subjects were analyzed. Mean age±SD was 33.0±19.7 years (range, 5–75), the male-to-female ratio was 114:73, and right-to-left eye ratio was 101:86. No significant difference was found in RNFLT between males and females (P = 0.6). Table 1 shows the average RNFLT by quadrant and clock hour in all the eyes. The RNFLT was at a maximum in the
Discussion
Retinal nerve fiber layer loss over and above age-related loss is what is important in making a diagnosis of glaucoma. With the GDx VCC and OCT, if it becomes possible to quantify normal age-related RNFL loss, then it may become possible to attribute the RNFL loss that may be the result of glaucoma only. Reproducibility and validity of OCT already has been demonstrated.16, 17, 18 Although our article does not report diagnostic accuracy of a machine, we followed the Standards for Reporting of
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Manuscript no. 2006-1005.
Supported in part by Hyderabad Eye Research Foundation, Hyderabad, India.