The meaurement of corneal epithelial thickne in repone to hypoxia uing optical coherence tomography

PURPOE: To determine if corneal epithelial thickne increae in aociation with corneal edema induced by wearing oft contact lene during eye cloure. DEIGN: Experimental tudy. METHOD: One eye (randomly elected) of twenty noncontact len wearer (10 male and 10 female, age 35.6 ± 9.6 year) wa patched during 3 hour of oft contact len (CL) wear and the contralateral eye acted a a control. Corneal and epithelial thickne of both eye wa meaured before and after CL wear uing optical coherence tomography (OCT). REULT: Immediately after contact len removal, total corneal thickne wa increaed ignificantly by 13.8 ± 2.3% (mean ± D) compared with baeline (P < .0001, paired t tet) and after 100 minute wa till 4.5 ± 2.3% thicker than baeline (P < .0001, paired t tet). The control eye howed no change in total corneal thickne (P > .05, paired t tet). Immediately after contact len removal, corneal epithelial thickne wa increaed by 1.7 ± 4.8%, but thi change wa not tatitically ignificant (P > .05, paired t tet). Following contact len removal, epithelial thickne changed ignificantly (Repeated meaure analyi of variance [Re-ANOVA]: F(7,133) = 4.91, pH-F < 0.001) over the next 100 minute with thinning recorded at 60, 80, and 100 minute (P < .05, paired t tet). There wa no ignificant change over time in epithelial thickne of the control eye (Re-ANOVA: F(4, 76) = 0.91, pH-F = 0.464). CONCLUION: OCT demontrated that corneal epithelial thickne doe not increae in repone to hypoxia from CL wear and eye cloure, in contrat to a ignificant increae in total corneal thickne.