Photo Credit: James Ebanks

Retinal vascular parameters are associated with stroke risk and can improve prediction of such an event, according to a study published in Heart. David S. Friedman, MD, PhD, and colleagues used the Retina-based Microvascular Health Assessment System to extract retinal vascular parameters from the UK Biobank fundus images. They examined associations between these parameters and incident stroke. The researchers identified 749 incident strokes among 45,161 participants (median follow-up, 12.5 years) and found 29 significant parameters associated with stroke risk, with a dominance of density parameters. Each standard deviation (SD) change in these parameters was associated with a 9.8% to 19.0% increase in stroke risk. Each SD decrease in identified complexity parameters and arterial inflection count tortuosity was associated with an increased risk (range, 10.4% to 19.5%). The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve improved to 0.752 with the introduction of retinal vascular parameters, significantly outperforming the model using traditional risk factors (0.739).