You are here

  • Home
  • Archive
  • Volume 5, Issue 1
  • Contrast sensitivity to spatial gratings in moderate and dim light conditions in patients with diabetes in the absence of diabetic retinopathy

Article Text

Article menu

Download PDFPDF

XML
Pathophysiology/Complications
Contrast sensitivity to spatial gratings in moderate and dim light conditions in patients with diabetes in the absence of diabetic retinopathy
  1. Sare Safi1,
  2. Anoushiravan Rahimi1,
  3. Afsaneh Raeesi2,
  4. Hamid Safi1,
  5. Mohammad Aghazadeh Amiri2,
  6. Mojtaba Malek3,
  7. Mehdi Yaseri4,
  8. Mohammad Haeri5,6,
  9. Frank A Middleton7,
  10. Eduardo Solessio8,
  11. Hamid Ahmadieh1
  1. 1Ophthalmic Research Center, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
  2. 2Department of Optometry, School of Rehabilitation, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
  3. 3Endocrine Research Center, Firouzgar Hospital, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
  4. 4Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
  5. 5Department of Pathology & Immunology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, USA
  6. 6Department of Molecular & Human Genetics, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, USA
  7. 7Department of Neuroscience & Physiology, Institute for Human Performance, SUNY Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, New York, USA
  8. 8Department of Ophthalmology, Center for Vision Research, Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, New York, USA
  1. Correspondence to Dr Hamid Ahmadieh; hahmadieh{at}hotmail.com and Dr Eduardo Solessio; solessie{at}upstate.edu

Abstract

Objective To evaluate the ability of contrast sensitivity (CS) to discriminate loss of visual function in diabetic subjects with no clinical signs of retinopathy relative to that of normal subjects.

Research design and methods In this prospective cross-sectional study, we measured CS in 46 diabetic subjects with a mean age of 48±6 years, a best-corrected visual acuity of 20/20 and no signs of diabetic retinopathy. The CS in these subjects was compared with CS measurements in 46 normal control subjects at four spatial frequencies (3, 6, 12, 18 cycles per degree) under moderate (500 lux) and dim (less than 2 lux) background light conditions.

Results CS was approximately 0.16 log units lower in patients with diabetes relative to controls both in moderate and in dim background light conditions. Logistic regression classification and receiver operating characteristic curve analysis indicated that CS analysis using two light conditions was more accurate (0.78) overall compared with CS analysis using only a single illumination condition (accuracy values were 0.67 and 0.70 in moderate and dim light conditions, respectively).

Conclusions Our results showed that patients with diabetes without clinical signs of retinopathy exhibit a uniform loss in CS at all spatial frequencies tested. Measuring the loss in CS at two spatial frequencies (3 and 6 cycles per degree) and two light conditions (moderate and dim) is sufficiently robust to classify diabetic subjects with no retinopathy versus control subjects.

  • diabetes
  • diabetic retinopathy
  • contrast sensitivity

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjdrc-2017-000408

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Contributors SS: Conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis, writing—original draft preparation, writing—review and editing. AR: conceptualization, methodology, data gathering, writing—original draft preparation—review and editing. AR: methodology, data gathering—writing. HS: methodology, writing—original draft preparation, writing—review and editing. MAA: resources, methodology, writing—original draft preparation. MM: resources, writing—original draft preparation. MY: formal analysis, writing—original draft preparation. MH: conceptualization, methodology, writing—original draft preparation. FAM: formal analysis, writing—original draft preparation. ES: conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis, writing—original draft preparation, writing—review and editing. HA: conceptualization, methodology, resources, formal analysis, writing—original draft preparation, writing—review and editing.

    • Funding ES was funded in part by the Lions of Central New York and by an unrestricted grant from Research to Prevent Blindness to the Department of Ophthalmology at SUNY Upstate Medical University.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent Obtained.

    • Ethics approval The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Ophthalmic Research Center affiliated to Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

    • Data sharing statement All data can be shared in SPSS software.