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

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Abstract
Preclinical Alzheimer’s disease (AD) includes cognitively healthy subjects with at least one positive biomarker: reduction in cerebrospinal fluid Aβ42 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.
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This research was funded by the Ophthalmological Network OFTARED (RD16/0008/0005) of the Institute of Health of Carlos III of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation; the Research Network RETIBRAIN (RED2018-102499-T) of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. I.L.-C. is currently supported by a Predoctoral Fellowship (CT42/18-CT43/18) from the Complutense University of Madrid. J.A.F.-A. is currently supported by a Predoctoral Fellowship (FPU17/01023) from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities. The sponsor or funding organization had no role in the design or conduct of this research.
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