December 16, 2021
Today we talk about the relationship between the retinal blood vessels and the cardiovascular system, and ophthalmologist Amândio Rocha-Sousa gives an account of the most recent research in this field:
What happens is that we have the privilege, on the retina, of seeing the blood vessels without any kind of cover. So, we can see our blood vessels directly and, on top of that, we have the means to study these blood vessels in a dynamic way. We can see how the red blood cells behave inside the blood vessels. How do we, stimulating with factors that promote vessel contraction and with factors that promote vessel dilation, how do these vascular networks behave; with this observation, we can try to find risk factors for heart disease but also find markers in the retina that allow us to see whether there is a greater or lesser risk of some heart diseases.
There are some very interesting things about the risk of having coronary heart disease, a contraction of the coronary arteries, by whether or not there is a change in the retinal vascularisation.
We are doing that in relation to a group of patients with heart failure in which we are studying the ocular part. And, in this case, we are doing that by complementing it with another type of analysis. We take from these patients a piece of tear and, with a partnership that we have with the Iberian Nanotechnology Institute in Braga, we analyse this tear and we go looking for prognostic factors for heart disease in this tear. We add to that the way in which the retinal vessels behave in this situation of severe heart disease. And, with these two things together, we will try to give a prognostic algorithm that may be important for us to be able to predict some events of this heart disease, such as hospital admissions, vascular dysfunction and try to improve the prognosis of these patients.
In tomorrow's programme we talk about blood samples and eye health.
With the support of the Portuguese Society of Ophthalmology.
