The association between the quality of life and the retinal nerve fiber layer thickness in patients with glaucoma
Main Article Content
Keywords
Glaucoma, Quality of life, Visual Function Questionnaire-25, Retinal nerve fiber layer thickness, global thickness, Superior and Inferior RNFL thickness
Abstract
Research found associations between quality of life (QoL) scores, structural and functional
measurements in glaucoma. However, structural associations with QoL only used global retinal
nerve fiber layer (RNFL) thickness in which individual sectors may demonstrate more RNFL
thickness loss than the global thickness. We aimed to evaluate the QoL in glaucoma patients and
its association with global, superior and inferior RNFL thicknesses. We recruited 30 glaucoma
patients to conduct a self-report questionnaire to assess their QoL. We also evaluated the
association between the questionnaire scores and the global, superior and inferior RNFL
thicknesses as we retrospectively analyzed them in patients and in age-similar controls. Because
the QoL reduction was in percentages, we converted the RNFL thickness loss to percentages, as
compared to 30 healthy participants. We found that the most affected category of the QoL by
glaucoma was role difficulties (44.73% loss) while the least was color vision (10% loss). The
strongest association was between the QoL scores and global RNFL thickness (R2 = 0.34), followed
by the association with the inferior sector (R2 = 0.28). We demonstrated the glaucoma effect on
the QoL, indicating that early and accurate diagnosis should be potentially implemented to
reduce the consequences of glaucoma. We also showed that global and inferior RNFL thicknesses
may help understand the association between the QoL scores and the RNFL thickness.
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