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Can the retina be used to diagnose and plot the progression of Alzheimer's disease?
Author(s) -
Mahajan D.,
Votruba M.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
acta ophthalmologica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.534
H-Index - 87
eISSN - 1755-3768
pISSN - 1755-375X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1755-3768.2017.0t061
Subject(s) - medicine , disease , dementia , retinal , macular degeneration , neuroscience , retina , intensive care medicine , pathology , bioinformatics , ophthalmology , psychology , biology
Purpose Alzheimer's disease is a neurodegenerative disease and the most common cause of senile dementia. The fact that the diagnosis can only be definitively made postmortem, or when the disease is fairly advanced, presents a serious problem if novel therapeutic interventions are to be devised and used early in the course of the disease. Therefore there is a pressing need for more sensitive and specific diagnostic tests with which we can detect Alzheimer's disease in the preclinical stage. In this presentation we describe the work of a systematic review,addressing the question whether the retina can be used to make a specific and early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. Methods This review was written during the EVER fellowship,2016 in the School of Optometry and Vision Sciences .All human and animal reviews, clinical and comparative studies, published in any language in the past 5 years from March 2011 were studies. 36 suitable papers were choosen after screening. Results With improvements in retinal imaging techniques like OCT , Doppler, FLIO and FLES , which are non invasive and inexpensive, the early diagnosis of AD is possible. Dynamic vessel analysis, retinal oximetry and adaptive optic retinal imaging are recent advances in retinal imaging, which provide a detailed analysis of the retina. Retinal vasculature screening may be a method for population screening of AD . With curcumin and immunotherapy the progression of the disease can be monitored and treatment can be planned, which is highly promising. Conclusions A high degree of clinical suspicion is needed to correlate problems in cognition with the changes in the eye, particularly the retina, pupil and ocular movements, so that the disease can be detected early and managed in the prodromal phase. The definitive diagnosis currently requires a combination of many biomarkers.