Abstract
The aim of the study was the multi-elemental analysis of aqueous humor (AH) collected from patients undergoing cataract surgery. The study included: 16 patients with age-related macular degeneration AMD (99 controls), 10 patients with retinopathy (105 controls), 61 patients with hypertension (54 controls), and 33 patients with coexisting diabetes (82 controls). The control groups were recruited from patients with a lack of co-existing disease characterizing the specified studied group. The measurements were performed by the use of inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES). The statistical analysis was carried out using non-parametric testing (Mann–Whitney U). The level of significance was set at p = 0.05. The data obtained revealed substantial variations in elemental composition between the test groups in comparison to the controls. However, the significant variations concerned only a few elements. The phosphorous (P) level and the ratio of P/Ca were significant in retinopathy and diabetes, whereas cobalt (0.091 ± 0.107 mg/L vs. 0.031 ± 0.075 mg/L; p = 0.004) was significant in AMD. In co-existing hypertension, the levels of tin (0.293 ± 0.409 mg/L vs. 0.152 ± 0.3 mg/L; p = 0.031), titanium (0.096 ± 0.059 mg/L vs. 0.152 ± 0.192 mg/L; p = 0.045), and ruthenium (0.035 ± 0.109 mg/L vs. 0.002 ± 0.007 mg/L; p = 0.006) varied in comparison to the controls. The study revealed inter-elemental interactions. The correlation matrices demonstrated the domination of the positive correlations, whereas negative correlations mainly concerned sodium.
Highlights
Many adults experience significant vision loss because of their elderly age or common ocular diseases such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD), cataracts, diabetic retinopathy (DR), or glaucoma.Despite available treatments, their etiology still remains poorly understood
The aim of the current study was to evaluate the elemental composition of aqueous humor (AH) in patients undergoing cataract surgery, suffering from diabetes, hypertension, or diabetic retinopathy
AH samples were examined by using inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES) with the aim to measure the concentration of 67 elements that were divided into 5 clusters according to the previous report [20]
Summary
Many adults experience significant vision loss because of their elderly age or common ocular diseases such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD), cataracts, diabetic retinopathy (DR), or glaucoma. Despite available treatments, their etiology still remains poorly understood. AH is produced constantly, owing to an active secretion by the nonpigmented ciliary epithelium [5,6] This is probably a more predominant source of eye fluid than diffusion and ultrafiltration of the plasma. It demonstrated that the difference in the concentration of various ions (for example, HCO3−, and Cl−) in comparison to blood plasma appears to be much larger than might be expected from the Gibbs–Donnan equilibrium. AH exhibits differences in protein composition in comparison with plasma
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