Novel biomarker for cardiovascular disease by assessing retinal blood vessels with polarisation sensitive optical coherence tomography

Preliminary data obtained with PS-OCT through the eyes of hypertensives suggests a mechanistic connection between arterial health and hypertension. In this study we want to determine whether arterial health may be more predictive of negative clinical outcomes than hypertension and blood glucose. Patients with various stages of hypertension, diabetes and coronary artery disease were recruited from Fiona Stanley Hospital (Perth). They were subsequently imaged with PS-OCT. The data were analyzed for retinal vessel wall thickness and vessel wall birefringence. We demonstrated that the combination of blood vessel wall tissue structure and wall thickness, a recognized clinical biomarker (Afsharan et al, BOE, 2021), could diagnose hypertension and diabetes with high sensitivity and specificity. PS-OCT measurements can detect the smallest changes related to cardiovascular disease in the retina before the disease manifests itself clinically. The method is cheap, noninvasive and easy to apply, which makes it highly suitable for screening, especially in underserved communities.