Diabetes and Your Eyes

What is diabetic eye disease? How can you prevent it from affecting you? If you have diabetes what is the most important thing you can do for your eyes?

Visit your medical doctor every three months and follow your medical plan! That involves taking your medicines every day exactly as they are prescribed, controlling your diet, checking your blood sugar daily, and may include daily exercise as recommended by your medical doctor.

What is the second most important thing you can do for your eyes?

See your eye doctor at least every year for a dilated retinal examination to ensure that you do not have diabetes in your eyes. Your eye doctor may recommend more frequent visits if you show signs of diabetic eye disease. Your eye doctor may also recommend treatment for your diabetic eye disease or diabetes related eye diseases such as glaucoma or diabetic cataracts.

This is what you should do:

·         Control your weight

·         Eat a proper diet

·         Regularly monitor your blood sugar at home

·         Take all your medications

·         Visit your eye doctor at least every year

If you do these things, the chances of developing serious eye problems due to diabetes mellitus are lowered!

What is diabetic eye disease?

The effect of diabetes on your eyes is referred to as diabetic eye disease. Early on, your diabetes can cause the inside of your eyes to bleed in small areas. Later, new blood vessels can form and cause more bleeding. If this process continues, it can cause blindness. The bleeding can become so bad that the inside of your eye can become filled with blood. If this happens, the chance of losing some amount of vision is high.

What other eye problems can diabetes cause?

If there are a lot of new blood vessels, they may cause scarring inside the eye, resulting in retinal detachments, which is another cause of permanent vision loss.

Diabetes makes you more likely to develop all forms of glaucoma. In some cases, new blood vessels may grow on the surface of the iris (the brown colored part of your eye), causing neovascular glaucoma, a particularly severe form of glaucoma.

Cataracts

Sometimes uncontrolled blood sugar levels can cause changes in your vision or cause cataracts. Diabetic cataracts make it very hard to see clearly and cause your vision to become hazy.

Diabetes and Your Eyes (continued)

What are the symptoms of diabetic eye disease?

Often there are no symptoms until diabetes has already done a lot of damage to your eyes! You may experience times of clear vision and times of blurry vision due to rapid shifts in blood sugar levels.

Even if you have diabetes in your eyes, it is possible that you may not have any symptoms. Many people with severe diabetic eye disease do not realize that they have a vision problem until it is too late and permanent damage has already occurred.

If you have cataract, vision may become blurry or hazy.

If you have glaucoma, you may not experience any symptoms until a significant loss of vision has already occurred.

What treatments are available?

For diabetic eye disease, laser treatment is the current treatment of choice. Injections of newer anti-vascular-proliferative medications may become more common in the future.

Cataracts are commonly treated with cataract surgery.

Glaucoma requires the use of antiglaucoma eye drops.

Remember:  If you are diabetic:

Visit your medical doctor every three months and follow your medical plan!  That involves taking your medicines every day exactly as they are prescribed, controlling your diet, checking your blood sugar daily, and may include daily exercise as recommended by your medical doctor.

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PEPC Code: EYE-DP                Reviewed: August 2011 M²HET

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