Correlation between the levels of pulse pressure difference and carotid atherosclerosis in patients with early hypertensive retinopathy

Objective: To explore and analyze the correlation between different pulse pressure levels and the de-gree of carotid atherosclerosis in patients with early hypertensive retinopathy.Methods: A total of 183 patients with early hypertensive retinopathy(patients with fundus lesions below grade II)admitted to 5 community health centers in Futian District of Shenzhen City from October 2021 to May 2022 were analyzed.According to the lev-el of pulse pressure difference, the patients were divided into two groups: pulse pressure difference< 7.98 kPa(group A, 95 cases)and pulse pressure difference ≥7.98 kPa(group B, 88 cases).The general data of the patients were collected, and the common carotid artery intima-media thickness(IMT), internal carotid artery resistance in-dex (RI), end-diastolic velocity (EDⅤ), and peak systolic velocity (PSⅤ) were detected by ultrasound.Both groups of patients were examined by optical coherence tomography angiography(OCTA)to obtain vascular den-sity (ⅤD), area of foveal avascular zone (FAZ), circumference of FAZ, and non-circular index (AI); the correla-tion between carotid hemodynamic parameters and fundus pathological parameters in hypertensive retinopathy patients with pulse pressure difference ≥7.98 kPa was analyzed; univariate and multivariate Logistic regres-sion analyses were used to analyze the influencing fac-tors of carotid atherosclerosis in patients with early hy-pertensive retinopathy.Results: The age, duration of hypertension, systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pres-sure, pulse pressure difference, and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol(LDL-C)in the group B were greatly high-er than those in the group A, while high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) and PSⅤwere greatly lower than those in the group A(P< 0.05).There were great differences in the proportions of patients with normal carot-id artery, thickening, plaque formation and stenosis between group A and the group B (P< 0.05).Among them, the proportion of patients with carotid artery stenosis in the group B was greatly higher.Univariate Logistic re-gression analysis showed that age, duration of hypertension and blood pressure were associated with carotid ath-erosclerosis in patients with early hypertensive retinopathy (P< 0.05).In the results of multivariate Logistic re-gression analysis, pulse pressure difference ≥7.98 kPa was an independent risk factor for carotid atherosclerosis in patients with early hypertensive retinopathy(P< 0.05).Conclusion: The pulse pressure level is closely related to carotid atherosclerosis in patients with early hypertensive retinopathy, which can provide a certain reference for evaluating and predicting the degree of carotid atherosclerosis in patients.