Individuals with serious mental illness (SMI) are prone to accelerated retinal thinning, according to a study published
yesterday in
Schizophrenia Bulletin. Among different illnesses assessed, schizophrenia was linked with the greatest retinal decline.
Foivos Georgiadis, M.D., of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and colleagues used optical exam data from more than 50,000 participants in the UK Biobank without SMI to develop charts of typical age-related retinal changes between the ages of 40 and 70. Next, the researchers examined how optical scans of 528 adults diagnosed with schizophrenia (n=170), bipolar disorder (n=263), or major depression (n=95) compared with the normal ranges.
Among the normative cohort, retinal thickness declined gradually with age as expected; for example, the average thickness of the macula—the small oval region in the center of the retina—was about 6μm thinner in adults 65 and older compared with those 45 and younger. Age-related decline was steeper in males than females, though males also had thicker retinas on average at middle-age.
Across all ages, retinal thickness was lower in adults with SMI than those without. The greatest difference from average was seen for schizophrenia, followed by bipolar disorder and then major depression. Females with mental illness showed more pronounced deviations than males.
The researchers also divided the participants with schizophrenia into those currently taking or not taking antipsychotics; they found that medication use did not influence retinal thickness.
“These findings reinforce the retina’s potential as a sensitive, accessible marker of [brain] integrity … and underscore the value of normative benchmarks for detecting both shared and distinct neurobiological changes across diagnostic groups,” Georgiadis and colleagues concluded.
(Image: Getty Images/iStock/jtamm)