Macular morphological changes in retinal vein occlusion with macular involvement and their association with macular ischemia

The aim is to study the association between macular morphological changes and macular ischemia in retinal vein occlusion (RVO) involving macula by spectral domain-optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT). Observational cross-sectional study. The study included a total of 31 eyes of 30 RVO patients involving macula divided into two groups on the basis of fundus fluorescein angiography: Group A (RVO with macular ischemia) and Group B (RVO without macular ischemia). In each patient, macular cube and horizontal HD raster scans of the macula were performed to evaluate quantitative (central foveal thickness [CFT]) and qualitative (loss of inner retinal layers, loss of foveal inner segment/outer segment [IS/OS] junction, and prominent middle-limiting membrane [p-MLM] sign) macular morphological changes, respectively. The continuous and categorical data were analyzed using unpaired t-test and Fisher’s exact test, respectively, with GraphPad Prism 9 software. The mean CFT was thinner in Group A (432.71 ± 172.30 µm) as compared to Group B (564.57 ± 151.16 µm) and the difference between the two groups was statistically significant (P < 0.05). In this study, we found that the loss of inner retinal layer and loss of foveal IS/OS junction were more commonly associated with the macular ischemia group and this difference was statistically significant P = 0.0245 and 0.0292, respectively. We did not find any significant relationship between p-MLM sign with macular ischemia. SD-OCT parameters such as CFT, loss of inner retinal layer, and loss of foveal IS/OS junction were observed to predict macular ischemia to some extent.