Evaluation of choroidal vascularity index in systemic sclerosis patients

Objective: To investigate the comparison of choroidal vascularity index (CVI) between patients with systemic sclerosis and healthy individuals.Methods: This study was designed prospective non-randomized cross-sectional study. Eighty-six eyes (43 patients) with limited cutaneous systemic sclerosis (lcSSc), 60 eyes (30 patients) with diffuse cutaneous systemic sclerosis (dcSSc) and 60 eyes (30 subjects) of age-and sex-matched healthy individuals were recruited. Subfoveal choroidal thickness, CVI and modified Rodnan skin score (mRSS) were evaluated. Enhanced depth imagingoptical coherence tomography scans were binarized using Niblack's autolocal threshold and CVI was determined as the luminal choroidal area/total choroidal area ratio.Results: The mean CCT values were 268.00 +/- 68.59 mu m, 286.90 +/- 70.88 mu m, 321.73 +/- 94.13 mu m in lcSSc group, dcSSc group and control group, respectively. The mean CVI was 61.84 +/- 2.84% in lcSSc group, 54.62 +/- 5.84% in dcSSc group and 62.41 +/- 4.13% in control group (p=0.001). The mean CVI of the SSc patients was 58.91 +/- 5.58 and there was significant difference between control group (p<0.001). The mean mRSS was 3.84 +/- 2.50 in lcSSc group and 14.07 +/- 6.81 in dcSSc group (p<0.001). There was a statistically significant negative correlation between mRSS and CVI (r=-0.448, p<0.001)Conclusion: Choroidal vascularity index provides valuable information to monitor the disease progression and lower CVI values seem to be related to the disease severity in patients with systemic sclerosis.