Week in review: Monitoring Alzheimer's with retinal images, smoking and myopia, cataract surgery follow-up care

A weekly roundup of ophthalmic news from around the web.

Look to the retina to help monitor cognitive decline. Disruptions in the blood–retinal barrier could be predictive of cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA), a marker of cognitive decline related to development of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Post-mortem retinal vascular tissues were obtained from 24 patients with AD, 10 patients with mild cognitive impairment, and 27 controls. Tissues from patients with higher CAA scores, indicating greater severity, showed a lack of expression of the tight junction proteins claudin-5 and ZO1, with a corresponding increase in vascular 40 amyloid beta (Aβ₄₀) accumulation. Given that Aβ₄₀ is a key component of CAA, the authors suggest that “real-time imaging of retinal blood vessels could be useful in monitoring the progression of AD.” Alzheimer's & Dementia

If you smoke, your child might end up needing glasses—or worse. Exposure to secondhand smoke at home (mean 10.5 cigarettes/day) led to a 1.3× increased risk of moderate myopia and a 2.6× increased risk of high myopia, according to results from a cross-sectional study of 12,630 children aged 6–8 years conducted in Hong Kong. The risk of developing moderate or high myopia further increased with greater secondhand smoke exposure. Children exposed to secondhand smoke also developed myopia at a younger age than children not exposed to secondhand smoke. JAMA Network Open

For patients, timing is everything, at least when it comes to postoperative care. That’s the finding from a retrospective case series of 70 patients who underwent uncomplicated cataract surgery at a single clinic and who had their first postoperative care exam either on the same day as the surgery or on the day after surgery. Patients were surveyed on their care experiences, and those who had same-day care reported greater cost and time savings than those who had next-day care. Thirty-one percent of patients who had next-day care would have preferred same-day care, while none of the patients who had same-day care would have preferred next-day care. Clinical Ophthalmology