Ocular Surface Temperature: Characterization in a Large Cohort of Healthy Human Eyes and Correlations to Systemic Cardiovascular Risk Factors.

Gal Yaakov Cohen,Sahar Benyosef,Reut Singer,Ari Leshno,Alon Skaat,Yaniv Barkana,Gil Ben-David,Rachel Shemesh

doi:10.3390/diagnostics11101877

Gal Yaakov Cohen, Sahar Benyosef + Show 6 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/diagnostics11101877

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Abstract

Purpose: To characterize ocular surface temperature (OST) in healthy eyes and its association with systemic risk factors of cardiovascular and ischemic heart disease. Methods: This prospective cross-sectional study included consenting subjects who were examined at the Institute for Medical Screening in Sheba Medical Center. A Therm-App™ thermal imaging camera (Opgal LTD, Israel) was used for OST acquisition, and the mean OST of the medial canthal, lateral canthal, and central cornea regions were measured. Room and body temperatures were also recorded. Past medical and ocular history as well as data from various clinical examinations performed at the same visit were obtained. Results: Thermographic images were obtained from 186 subjects, 150 of which were included in the final analysis. OST was significantly higher in the medial canthal, central cornea, and lateral canthal regions in people with a history of ischemic heart disease (p = 0.02, p = 0.02, and p = 0.03, respectively). There were no significant OST differences (ANOVA test) associated with the presence of hypertension, diabetes mellitus, or active smoking status. Conclusions: OST correlated positively with the presence of ischemic heart disease. This correlation, its pathophysiological base, and its clinical application warrants further investigation.

Highlights

There was no significant difference between the two eyes (p = 0.4), and the left eye was randomly selected in the statistical analysis and group comparisons shown below
Our results demonstrated a direct association between ischemic heart disease and ocular surface temperature (OST)
Male sex was associated with a higher OST this difference was statistially significant only at the central corneal region, and sex did not remain a significant predictor of OST in the multivariate analysis

Summary

Introduction

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Recent technological improvements have produced images with sufficiently high resolution that enable the use of this technique in the clinical setting in order to detect and define vascular, inflammatory, and neoplastic pathologies [4,5,6]. It is currently applied in the diagnosis of rheumatic diseases, vascular occlusive disorders, tissue viability, and oncological and dermatological pathologies [4]. Our purpose was to utilize our access to a large cohort of individuals undergoing both ocular and medical screening examinations that included cardiovascular assessments in order to collect OST measurements of healthy eyes and to identify possible correlations between selected cardiovascular risk factors, ischemic heart disease, and OST findings

Study Design and Study Population

Thermographic Image Capture

Statistical Analysis

Findings

Discussion