The Value of OCT and OCTA as Potential Biomarkers for Preclinical Alzheimer’s Disease: A Review Study

Preclinical Alzheimer’s disease (AD) includes cognitively healthy subjects with at least one positive biomarker: reduction in cerebrospinal fluid Aβ<sub>42</sub> or visualization of cerebral amyloidosis by positron emission tomography imaging. The use of these biomarkers is expensive, in...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Inés López-Cuenca, Elena Salobrar-García, Lorena Elvira-Hurtado, José A. Fernández-Albarral, Lidia Sánchez-Puebla, Juan J. Salazar, José M. Ramírez, Ana I. Ramírez, Rosa de Hoz
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2021-07-01
Series:Life
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/11/7/712
Description
Summary:Preclinical Alzheimer’s disease (AD) includes cognitively healthy subjects with at least one positive biomarker: reduction in cerebrospinal fluid Aβ<sub>42</sub> or visualization of cerebral amyloidosis by positron emission tomography imaging. The use of these biomarkers is expensive, invasive, and not always possible. It has been shown that the retinal changes measured by optical coherence tomography (OCT) and OCT-angiography (OCTA) could be biomarkers of AD. Diagnosis in early stages before irreversible AD neurological damage takes place is important for the development of new therapeutic interventions. In this review, we summarize the findings of different published studies using OCT and OCTA in participants with preclinical AD. To date, there have been few studies on this topic and they are methodologically very dissimilar. Moreover, these include only two longitudinal studies. For these reasons, it would be interesting to unify the methodology, make the inclusion criteria more rigorous, and conduct longer longitudinal studies to assess the evolution of these subjects. If the results were consistent across repeated studies with the same methodology, this could provide us with insight into the value of the retinal changes observed by OCT/OCTA as potential reliable, cost-effective, and noninvasive biomarkers of preclinical AD.
ISSN:2075-1729