Research Paper Volume 13, Issue 7 pp 9433—9454
Longitudinal normative OCT retinal thickness data for wild-type mice, and characterization of changes in the 3×Tg-AD mice model of Alzheimer's disease
- 1 University of Coimbra, Coimbra Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Translational Research (CIBIT), Institute for Nuclear Sciences Applied to Health (ICNAS), Coimbra, Portugal
- 2 University of Coimbra, Coimbra Institute for Clinical and Biomedical Research (iCBR), Faculty of Medicine (FMUC), Coimbra, Portugal
- 3 University of Coimbra, Center for Innovative Biomedicine and Biotechnology (CIBB), Coimbra, Portugal
- 4 University of Coimbra, Clinical Academic Center of Coimbra (CACC), Faculty of Medicine (FMUC), Coimbra, Portugal
- 5 University of Coimbra, Laboratory of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine (FMUC), Coimbra, Portugal
- 6 University of Coimbra, Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology (CNC), Coimbra, Portugal
- 7 Universidade Aberta, Department of Sciences and Technology, Lisboa, Portugal
Received: December 6, 2020 Accepted: March 23, 2021 Published: April 2, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202916How to Cite
Copyright: © 2021 Ferreira et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Mice are widely used as models for many diseases, including eye and neurodegenerative diseases. However, there is a lack of normative data for retinal thickness over time, especially at young ages. In this work, we present a normative thickness database from one to four-months-old, for nine layers/layer-aggregates, including the total retinal thickness, obtained from the segmentation of spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) data from the C57BL6/129S mouse strain. Based on fifty-seven mice, this normative database provides an opportunity to study the ageing of control mice and characterise disease models' ageing, such as the triple transgenic mouse model of Alzheimer's disease (3×Tg-AD) used in this work. We report thickness measurements, the differences in thickness per layer, demonstrate a nasal-temporal asymmetry, and the variation of thickness as a function to the distance to the optic disc centre. Significant differences were found between the transgenic group's thickness and the normative database for the entire period covered in this study. Even though it is well accepted that retinal nerve fibre layer (RNFL) thinning is a hallmark of neurodegeneration, our results show a thicker RNFL-GCL (RNFL-Ganglion cell layer) aggregate for the 3×Tg-AD mice until four-months-old.