Lamina Cribrosa Essay

INTRODUCTION The lamina cribrosa (LC) within the scleral canal in the optic nerve head (ONH) is thought to be the primary site of axonal insult in glaucoma.1-3 It is of interest in glaucoma to understand the anatomy of the LC and surrounding tissues and how they change with aging and disease. LC has been investigated using a variety of methods, including histologic section,4,5 detergent digestion of surrounding tissues6,7 and finite element modeling.8,9 In human glaucomatous eyes, LC alterations may include posterior deformation,7,10 compression and thinning,10,11 molecular changes in astrocytes and other glial cells,12,13 laminar beam and pore size alterations14 and posterior migration of both the anterior and posterior laminar insertions from the sclera toward and sometimes into the pial sheath.15 Previous reports have suggested that spectral domain (SD) optical coherence tomography (OCT) ONH imaging can visualize the LC in vivo.16-18 A relatively new approach to SD-OCT, known as enhanced depth imaging (EDI) OCT, has been shown to improve visibility of deep ONH structures when compared with conventional SD-OCT.19-22 Even though glaucomatous changes of different ONH parameters have been …show more content…
In addition, LC thickness correlated significantly with cup depth (R2=0.135, p=0.045), eyes with thinner LCs presenting deeper cups. Age, race, disc size, axial length and central corneal thickness were not significant in this model (p≥0.08). Figures 2 and 3 show the association between laminar and prelaminar neural tissue thickness with cup depth. In variation from the aforementioned analyses, these two plots included both glaucomatous and control eyes, in order to provide value distribution for the entire study