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Myopia related stepwise and quadrant retinal microvascular alteration and its correlation with axial length

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First Author: b.Ke CHINA

Co Author(s):    M. Liu   P. Wang   X. Hu   C. Zhu   Y. Yuan        

Abstract Details

Purpose:

To investigate the characteristics of retinal vascular alterations in varying degrees of myopia, and to determine correlated variables and alteration pattern over different retinal zones.

Setting:

Department of Ophthalmology, Shanghai General Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China.

Methods:

A total of 208 right eyes of 208 myopes were enrolled and divided into mild, moderate, high, and extreme myopia groups according to spherical equivalent (SE). Macular vasculatures in superficial, deep, and whole retinal layers were imaged with optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA). Bennett’s formula was applied for axial length (AL) magnification correction and fractal analysis (box counting, Dbox) for quantification of microvascular and macrovascular density in different quadrants and annular zones through a customized software. Simple linear regressions and ridge regression analysis were used to determine the explanatory variables of retinal microvascular density.

Results:

Compared with mild myopes, moderate myopes showed lower retinal microvascular densities in superficial, deep, and whole retinal layers (all p<0.05). Moreover, the same declining trend was observed when high myopia was compared with moderate myopia (all p<0.05) and extreme myopia was compared with high myopia (all p<0.05). During quadrant analysis, only inferior nasal (IN) quadrant showed no difference in microvascular density between mild and moderate groups. Ridge regression showed that microvascular densities in all three layers were significantly correlated with AL (scaled estimates -0.139, -0.103, -0.154; all p<0.001) and SE (scaled estimates -0.052, -0.096, -0.057; all p<0.05).

Conclusions:

We characterized a stepwise reduction of retinal microvascular density from mild to extreme myopia, which presented with spatial preference in different retinal zones and showed stronger correlation with AL than SE.

Financial Disclosure:

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