Abstract
Myopic axial eye growth has mechanical implications on ocular structures, such as the retinal and foveal shape integrity or choroidal thickness. The current study investigated myopia-related changes of retinal radius of curvature, foveal width, depth, slope and choroidal thickness. Wide-field swept-source OCT line and volume scans were performed on 40 young adult participants in horizontal and vertical directions. OCT scans were corrected for their scan display distortions before automated extraction of retinal and foveal shape parameters. All findings were correlated to refractive error and axial length. The horizontal retinal radius of curvature and the directional ratio between horizontal and vertical retinal shape correlated significantly with axial length (rho =+0.53, p<0.001 and rho =+0.35, p<0.05). Vertical retinal shape and foveal pit parameters neither showed any significant correlations with axial length nor refractive error (all p> 0.05). Choroidal thickness correlated significantly with refractive error in all analyzed regions (rho +0.39,mathrm{to},+0.52), but less with axial length (rho -0.18 to − 0.37). Horizontal retinal shape and choroidal thickness, but not foveal pit morphology, were altered by myopic eye growth. Asymmetries in horizontal versus vertical retinal shape with increasing myopia were detected. These parameters could act as promising biomarkers for myopia and its associated complications.
Highlights
Myopic axial eye growth has mechanical implications on ocular structures, such as the retinal and foveal shape integrity or choroidal thickness
Myopia is caused by a mismatch between the ocular focal length and axial length due to excessive eye growth[2]
An increased myopic refractive error reflects a longer axial length, which leads to growth-induced retinal changes due to mechanical stretching of the tissue
Summary
Myopic axial eye growth has mechanical implications on ocular structures, such as the retinal and foveal shape integrity or choroidal thickness. Macular degeneration occurs up to 350 times more often in m yopes[4,6] As these diseases commonly lead to a potentially irreversible loss of sight, and will affect an increasing part of the worldwide population, one aim in myopia research is to identify biomarkers for myopia. These biomarkers should describe myopic eye growth and associated risks, while being obtained by clinically feasible measurement procedures. Indirect measurement techniques suffer from a certain inaccuracy, while recent direct procedures, such as MRI, are of reduced clinical feasibility and too cost-intensive Due to these limitations, optical coherence tomography (OCT) as established tool for in-vivo retinal imaging was Scientific Reports | (2020) 10:10886. The majority finds decreasing choroidal thickness with increasing m yopia[30,31,32,33,34,35]
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