Fondazione Policlinico A. Gemelli IRCCS, Roma, Italia.
Istituto di Fisica, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Roma, Italia.
PLoS One. 2019 Aug 7;14(8):e0220571. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0220571. eCollection 2019.
Many ocular diseases are associated with an alteration of the mechanical and the material properties of the eye. These mechanically-related diseases include macular hole and pucker, two ocular conditions due to the presence of abnormal physical tractions acting on the retina. A complete relief of these tractions can be obtained through a challenging microsurgical procedure, which requires the mechanical peeling of the internal limiting membrane of the retina (ILM). In this paper, we provide the first comparative study of the nanoscale morphological and mechanical properties of the ILM in macular hole and macular pucker. Our nanoscale elastic measurements unveil a different bio-mechanical response of the ILM in the two pathologies, which correlates well to significant differences occurring during microsurgery. The results here presented pave the way to the development of novel dedicated microsurgical protocols based on the material ILM properties in macular hole or pucker. Moreover, they contribute to clarify why, despite a common aetiology, a patient might develop one disease or the other, an issue which is still debated in literature.
许多眼部疾病都与眼睛的机械和物质特性的改变有关。这些与机械相关的疾病包括黄斑裂孔和黄斑皱缩，这两种眼部疾病是由于视网膜上存在异常的物理牵引力。通过一项具有挑战性的显微手术，可以完全缓解这些牵引力，该手术需要机械剥离视网膜内界膜（ILM）。在本文中，我们首次对黄斑裂孔和黄斑皱缩中 ILM 的纳米级形态和力学性能进行了比较研究。我们的纳米级弹性测量揭示了两种病理状态下 ILM 的不同生物力学响应，这与显微手术过程中发生的显著差异很好地相关。这里呈现的结果为基于黄斑裂孔或黄斑皱缩中 ILM 的材料特性开发新型专用显微手术方案铺平了道路。此外，它们有助于阐明为什么尽管病因相同，但患者可能会患上一种疾病或另一种疾病，这是文献中仍在争论的问题。
