Original articleProgressive Macula Vessel Density Loss in Primary Open-Angle Glaucoma: A Longitudinal Study
Section snippets
Methods
This was a prospective, longitudinal observational study. Participants were recruited from the Diagnostic Innovations in Glaucoma Study (DIGS) (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT00221897).28 This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and conformed to the tenets of the Declaration of Helsinki and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Written informed consent was obtained from all participants.
Results
One-hundred and eighteen eyes of 89 participants were initially enrolled. Eighteen eyes were excluded from study because of poor-quality OCT-A images (13), poor fixation (2), motion artifact (2), and fovea off center (1). Thus there were 100 eyes (32 glaucoma eyes of 26 patients, 30 glaucoma-suspect eyes of 22 patients, and 38 healthy eyes of 29 subjects) available for analysis. Table 1 summarizes the baseline characteristics of the study subjects. The median number of examinations was 3 (2 for
Discussion
Even with a relatively short follow-up of 13 months, this study demonstrated that rate of macula vessel density loss in glaucoma eyes was significantly faster than in both glaucoma-suspect and healthy eyes. In contrast, the rate of change in GCC thickness was not significantly different from zero, and no significant differences in the rate of GCC change among diagnostic groups were found.
Gadde and associates used local fractal analysis to calculate macula vessel densities within a
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