Normative values of retinal vessel oximetry in healthy children against adults

Abstract

PurposeRetinal oximetry (RO) has been established as a non‐invasive method to analyze oxygen saturation in retinal vessels. The aim of our study was to compare metabolic (oxygen saturation) and anatomical (retinal vessel diameter) RO parameters of healthy children against adults.MethodsA total of 157 eyes of 79 healthy subjects were examined: 20 eyes of children (7–18 year) were compared to adults of different age groups [20–29 year (n = 16); 30–39 year (n = 46); 40–49 year (n = 38); 50–59 year (n = 25), 60–87 year (n = 12)]. RO was performed with the oxygen saturation measurement tool of the Retinal Vessel Analyser (RVA; IMEDOS Systems UG, Jena, Germany). The oxygen saturation in all four major peripapillary retinal arterioles (A‐SO2) and venules (V‐SO2) were measured and their difference (A‐V SO2) was calculated. In addition, we evaluated the corresponding diameter in retinal arterioles (D‐A) and venules (D‐V). For statistical evaluation non‐parametric tests (Friedman test for multiple comparisons, paired Wilcoxon rank sum test for pairwise comparisons) were performed.ResultsChildren showed statistically significant lower arterial oxygen saturation values (A‐SO2) compared to all adult subgroups (Friedman test, p = 0.0005). Although not statistically significant, the values of V‐SO2 (p = 0.06) and A‐V SO2 (p = 0.30) showed a trend to be lower in children. The D‐A (p = 0.49) and D‐V (p = 0.82) values were not significantly different between groups.ConclusionsThese data indicate that the retinal oxygen metabolism changes throughout lifetime. Therefore, normative data for different age groups are mandatory.