Myocardial infarction and cerebral stroke are leading causes of death and severe disability in the western world. The mainstay of effective prevention is the identification of subjects at risk followed by tailored and firm treatment to alter the course of events.
The eye is the only organ of the human body where small vessels can be directly observed and assessed non-invasively. The alterations observed in the ocular vascular tree are characteristic of the pathologic processes occurring in the brain and other organs in the body.
The basic scientific background for using retinal vasculature for systemic risk assessment was investigated extensively in a series of epidemiologic studies, the ARIC studies:
- The relative risk of stroke increases with decreasing AVR (Wong et al., Lancet 2001).
- Retinal vasculature can be used to assess the systemic risk for cardiovascular disease and to derive information on the systemic vascular status (Hubbard et al., Ophthalmology 1999).
- This method can be applied clinically to predict the risk of cerebral infarction (Wong et al., JAMA 2002).
