Association between early-stage chronic kidney disease and reduced choroidal thickness in essential hypertensive patients.

The introduction in the past few years of advanced optical coherence tomography (OCT) techniques has greatly increased our understanding of the choroid, which is the most important vascular layer of the eye. Our study aimed to assess choroidal thickness by using swept-source OCT (SS-OCT) in essential hypertensive patients (EHs) with and without early-stage chronic kidney disease (CKD). We enrolled 100 EHs, of whom 65 were without kidney damage, and 35 had stage 1-3 CKD. In all of the participants, SS-OCT and a routine biochemical workup were performed. Glomerular filtration rate (GFR) was estimated by the CKD Epidemiology Collaboration equation (eGFR). CKD was defined in agreement with the …