Ophthalmologic Outcomes in Patients With Carotid Artery Stenosis

Plain-language summary

The retinal vessels have been shown to reflect vascular changes inherent to systemic pathologies, even when no ocular disease is identified. As such, the eye's vasculature is ableto serve as a window to the vascular health of the human body and a means of assessing systemic endothelial function. Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) employs optical means to image all the retinal vascular layers and the choroid, providing an extremely detailed image of the microvascular network in a fast, reproducible and totally non-invasive way. As such, it is currently the best non-invasive way of having an image of human capillaries. Recently, OCTA has been used to study the retinal vessels' structure and function in several cardiovascular diseases. As an example of its predictive potential, reduced retinal microvascular density has been associated with the cardiovascular risk profile in patients admitted to the hospital for an acute coronary syndrome. Recent studies have also shown the retinal microvasculature density to be reduced in patients with carotid artery disease (CAD), namely carotid stenosis, and that endarterectomy increases retinal flow and vessel density.

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