Diabetes

Diabetes is a life-long condition that can affect your eyes. The disease occurs when your blood sugar is too high. There are two types of diabetes.

Type 1: This occurs when your body doesn’t produce enough insulin due to the immune system attacking the cells that create it. Although it can develop at any age, it’s usually diagnosed in children and young adults.

Type 2: This occurs when your body doesn’t make or use insulin well. It is the most common type of diabetes and usually develops in middle-aged and older people.

Diabetes and your eyes

Changes in blood sugar levels caused by diabetes can damage the back of the eye, also known as the retina. The retina enables you to see by receiving and organising visual information. However, in order for the retina to work properly, it needs a constant supply of blood. The persistently high blood sugar levels associated with diabetes can damage these blood vessels over time, resulting in diabetic retinopathy.

Symptoms of diabetic retinopathy

Symptoms may not be noticeable in the early stages of diabetic retinopathy but in the more advanced stages, this is what you can expect:

• blurred or patchy vision
• eye pain
• eye redness
• trouble seeing in the dark
• gradually worsening vision
• sudden vision loss
• shapes floating in your field of vision.

Risk factors for developing diabetic retinopathy

People are more at risk of developing diabetic retinopathy if they:

• have had type 1 or type 2 diabetes for a long time
• have high blood pressure or cholesterol
• are pregnant
• have a persistently high blood sugar level.

Protecting your eyes

If left undiagnosed and untreated, diabetic retinopathy can threaten your sight and even lead to blindness. As symptoms are not obvious in the early stages of the disease, regular eye exams and advanced retinal scans can help with early detection.

For diabetics, we recommend and offer a yearly dilated eye exam to monitor your eye health. During your diabetic screening, we’ll first dilate your pupils to get a better view of the retina. We’ll then use our Topcon slit lamp with a volk lens to look inside the eye to check the retina and look at the lens, followed by our Topcon Maestro OCT.

Eye examinations can be booked online for Byrne’s Opticians.