Research Paper Volume 9, Issue 11 pp 2436—2452
T-cell differentiation and CD56+ levels in polypoidal choroidal vasculopathy and neovascular age-related macular degeneration
- 1 Clinical Eye Research Division, Department of Ophthalmology, Zealand University Hospital, Roskilde, Denmark
- 2 Faculty of Health and Medical Science, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
- 3 Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto, Japan
- 4 Department of Ophthalmology, Skåne University Hospital Malmö-Lund, Lund, Sweden
- 5 Eye Research Unit, Department of Immunology and Microbiology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Received: September 15, 2017 Accepted: November 11, 2017 Published: November 20, 2017
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.101329How to Cite
Copyright: Subhi 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
Polypoidal choroidal vasculopathy (PCV) and neovascular age-related macular degeneration (AMD) are prevalent age-related diseases characterized by exudative changes in the macula. Although they share anatomical and clinical similarities, they are also distinctly characterized by their own features, e.g. vascular abnormalities in PCV and drusen-mediated progression in neovascular AMD. PCV remains etiologically uncharacterized, and ongoing discussion is whether PCV and neovascular AMD share the same etiology or constitute two substantially different diseases. In this study, we investigated T-cell differentiation and aging profile in human patients with PCV, patients with neovascular AMD, and age-matched healthy control individuals. Fresh venous blood was prepared for flow cytometry to investigate CD4+ and CD8+ T-cell differentiation (naïve, central memory, effector memory, effector memory CD45ra+), loss of differentiation markers CD27 and CD28, and expression of aging marker CD56. Patients with PCV were similar to the healthy controls in all aspects. In patients with neovascular AMD we found significantly accelerated T-cell differentiation (more CD28-CD27- cells) and aging (more CD56+ cells) in the CD8+ T-cell compartment. These findings suggest that PCV and neovascular AMD are etiologically different in terms of T cell immunity, and that neovascular AMD is associated with T-cell immunosenescence.