advertisement

Editors Selection IGR 13-1

Optical Coherence Tomography: Outer retina changes in glaucoma

Comment by Michael Nork on:

27836 Evidence of outer retinal changes in glaucoma patients as revealed by ultrahigh-resolution in vivo retinal imaging, Choi SS; Zawadzki RJ; Lim MC et al., British Journal of Ophthalmology, 2011; 95: 131-141

Find related abstracts

There is a growing body of evidence that the outer retina (especially the cones) is affected in human chronic glaucoma. Choi et al. (204) both confirm and extend this knowledge in the living eye using three ultra-high resolution retinal imaging modalities in ten glaucoma patients. All three modalities demonstrated outer retinal changes in addition to the expected inner retinal thinning in all of the glaucomatous eyes with visual field loss. Of particular interest is the AO-FC en face images showing dark areas in the cone mosaic at retinal locations corresponding the visual field losses. The controls for this study were intrasubject, i.e., areas with visual field losses were compared with areas of normal visual sensitivity within the same eye. Previous morphologic studies in glaucoma have been limited to histopathology on either post-mortem human eyes or animal eyes with experimental glaucoma. Although outer retinal effects in glaucoma have been well established, the ability examine retinal morphology at such a fine level of detail in vivo opens up exciting possibilities for future research and, perhaps, new testing modalities that will detect glaucomatous ocular injury more reliably and at an earlier stage. It will be interesting to learn how well such testing works in the 'real world' of elderly patients who often have significant media opacities.

• ← Previous
• Next →