COMPARISON OF CHOROIDAL THICKNESS BETWEEN SMOKERS WITH NON-SMOKERS USING OPTICAL COHERENCE TOMOGRAPHY

Abstract

Background. Smoking is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. smoking has played a role in the cause of death of approximately 6 million people per year (Muezzinler et al., 2015). While some diseases that cause morbidity and mortality from smoking include myocard infarct, cerebrovascular damage, lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Smoking is also one of the factors that affects damage to visual disorders, such as cataracts, or macular degeneration (McNabula and Gill, 2009; Mojon et al., 2008). Smoking can result in changes in retinal and choroidal vascular and endothelial reactivity and high risk of affecting the onocyal neovascular (SanGiovanni et al., 2009; Chovdar and Chakravarthy, 2003; Chakravarthy et al., 2007). Method. The study has been done on 78 subjects who met the inclusion criteria were found smokers and 37 people (74 eyes) while non-smokers numbered 41 people (82 eyes) who attended ophthalmologist?s outpatient clinic in University of Sumatera Utara (USU) Hospital from July 2019. Visual Acuity and Choroidal Thickness were measured and compared. Result: From 78 research subjects, most subjects were aged ?30 years, male, filter smokers with smoking frequency ?1 packs and duration ?10 years. This study used the t-test independent test analysis and found that CT depletion was statistically significant in the group of smokers with a p value = 0.002. In more detail, a group of non-filter smokers is known to have significant CT depletion with p = 0.001 in the right eye and p = 0.002 left eye compared to filter smokers. The duration of smoking is also known to cause CT depletion especially in smokers> 10 years where p = 0.001 in the right and left eye is the same. In the group of smokers with total cigarette consumption> 1 pack / day, there was a significant CT depletion with p = 0.001 in the right eye and p = 0.004 in the left eye. Conclusion. There was a significant depletion in the choroidal thickness of the smokers group.