Retinal arteriolar tortuosity as a candidate genetic window to inner-ear microvasculature: distributed sharing with blood pressure at CSK and PAWR and a roadmap for larger hearing GWAS

Background: The inner ear is supplied by the labyrinthine artery, which is functionally close to an end artery with limited collateral reserve. Microvascular abnormalities have been implicated in sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL) and age-related hearing loss, yet inner-ear microvasculature cannot be assessed in vivo and current hearing genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are underpowered. We evaluated the shared genetic architecture of retinal arteriolar tortuosity (retina_AT) with blood pressure, cerebral small vessel disease (cSVD) and hearing phenotypes, and examined whether reti

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