Assessing Age-dependent Reference Values for Microvascular Structure and Function in Healthy Participant Together With Macrovascular Function With Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography

The greatest challenge in our ageing society are cardiovascular diseases such as stroke, heart attack, peripheral artery disease of the legs with non-healing wounds (ulcers), or diabetes. How healthy ageing affects the smallest blood vessels (microcirculation) and is not well understood. One reason for this is that no generally available medical instrument has the resolution to study the microcirculation. The recently developed optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA), currently mainly used by eye doctors, is able to visualise the microcirculation. We have developed an automated software (OCTAVA) to determine metrics to characterise the microcirculation on the layers of density, diameter and tortuosity.

In the current study we aim at providing reference values of these metrics in hands and feet of healthy people according to age together with macrovascular function in arms and legs.