NCT02663531

Retinal Neuro-vascular Coupling in Patients With Neurodegenerative Disease

• Status: Unknown
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 150 (estimated)
• Sponsor: Medical University of Vienna · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 50 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

Alzheimer´s disease (AD) in one of the most important causes of dementia and poses a considerable challenge in health care. Today, criteria for the diagnosis and the follow up of patients with AD mainly rely either on subjective tests or invasive methods. This limits the general applicability of the latter test for population screening and underlines the need for the identification of easily accessible tools for the identification of high-risk subjects. Because of its unique optical properties, the eye offers the possibility of the non-invasive assessment of both structural and functional alterations in neuronal tissue. As the neuro-retina is part of the brain, it does not come as a surprise that neuro-degenerative changes in the brain are accompanied by structural and possibly also functional changes in the neuro-retina and the ocular vasculature. The current study seeks to test the hypothesis that beside the known anatomical changes, also functional changes can be detected in the retina of patients with AD. For this purpose, flicker light induced hyperemia will be measured in the retina as a functional test to assess the coupling between neural activity and blood flow. Further, structural parameters such as retinal nerve fiber layer thickness and function parameters such as ocular blood flow and retinal oxygenation will be assessed and compared to age and sex matched controls.

Conditions

• Mild Cognitive Impairment
• Alzheimer Disease
• Healthy

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
DEVICE	DVA
DEVICE	FDOCT
DEVICE	Pattern ERG
DEVICE	Optical Coherence Tomography

Timeline

• Start date: 2016-09-27
• Primary completion: 2023-09-01
• Completion: 2023-09-30
• First posted: 2016-01-26
• Last updated: 2022-04-07

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Austria