Usefulness of peripapillary nerve fiber layer thickness assessed by optical coherence tomography as a biomarker for Alzheimer’s disease

AI Generated Summary*

Peripapillary retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) thickness was measured by optical coherence tomography in 930 consecutive memory clinic patients: 414 cognitively healthy, 192 with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and 324 with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD). Of 3,930 invited, 24.4% were excluded for eye disease, mainly glaucoma and maculopathy. Mean RNFL fell from 100.20 µm in controls to 98.54 (MCI) and 96.61 (AD), a non-significant decline. Adjusted for age, sex, education and image quality, neither overall thickness (p = 0.352) nor any quadrant (p = 0.119 to 0.825) separated groups, and matched comparisons agreed. Scan quality, age and education outweighed diagnosis in explaining variance, so these cross-sectional results do not support peripapillary RNFL as a cognitive impairment marker.

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