The Effects of Gender, Age, and Refractive Error on Corneal and Conjunctival Epithelial and Overall Thicknesses
İsmail Erşan 1 * , Selcuk Kara, Sedat Arıkan, Baran Gencer, Hasan Ali Tufan
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1 Çanakkale 18 Mart Üniversitesi Tıp Fakültesi, Göz Hastalıkları A.D., Çanakkale, Turkey* Corresponding Author

Abstract

Objective: To evaluate the corneal, conjunctival epithelial and overall thicknesses measured by anterior segment optical coherence tomography (OCT) in healthy popula­tion.
Methods: This retrospective study included 134 eyes of 134 healthy individuals who were undergone a Cirrus HD-OCT examination using the Anterior Segment 5 Line Ras­ter protocol. Corneal, conjunctival epithelial and overall thicknesses were measured on OCT images. The aver­age values of four OCT parameters were compared be­tween sexes and among the six subgroups with respect to age.
Results: The average corneal epithelial and overall thick­nesses were 51.30±4.60 μm and 532.47±37.30 μm, re­spectively. The average conjunctival epithelial and over­all thicknesses were 47.20±8.03 μm and 237.07±40.62 μm, respectively. All of the measurements were thicker in males compared to females, however the significant dif­ference was found for only corneal epithelium (p=0.043). Using the Spearman correlation coefficient, central cor­neal and conjunctival epithelial thicknesses showed sig­nificant negative correlations with age (p=0.006, p=0.005, respectively) and refraction (p=0.040, p=0.033, respec­tively).
Conclusion: Ocular surface parameters measured by anterior segment OCT were gender, age, and refraction-related. Thus, further studies conducted to evaluate the corneal and conjunctival thicknesses should involve gen­der, age, and refraction-matched control groups.

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This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Article Type: Research Article

J Clin Exp Invest, 2016, Volume 7, Issue 1, 78-82

https://doi.org/10.5799/jcei.328687

Publication date: 01 Mar 2016

Article Views: 1775

Article Downloads: 1076

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