Diabetes Eye Center

Diabetes: How it affects your eyes and what you can do to prevent vision loss

Diabetes and Your Eyes

Diabetes is a very serious disease that can affect your vision. In fact, diabetes is a leading cause of severe vision loss in the United States. The good news is that by working with your primary care doctor on controlling your sugar and by making regular visits to your eye doctor, you can preserve your vision and protect your eyes. While preservation of vision is the most important first step, today we have innovative treatments that restore vision loss for diabetic patients.

How does diabetes affect the eye?

Diabetes affects different parts of the eye:

The Retina:

The retina does for the eye what the film does for a camera – it is the very thin layer of nervous tissue in the back of the eye where images are captured. With time, and if the blood sugar is not well-controlled, the blood vessels in the retina may become damaged. This is known as diabetic retinopathy. These damaged blood vessels can then bleed. They can also leak serum, causing swelling of the retina. Eventually, the damage to the blood vessels can become so severe that they can shut down, causing parts of the retina to die.

The Lens:

The lens of the eye, like the lens of a camera, focuses the image on the eye’s “film” (the retina). Clouding of the lens happens in diabetics as a result of elevated blood sugar; this clouding is called a cataract. While cataracts happen naturally to older people, they may present earlier in life and more frequently in diabetics with poor blood sugar control.

The Optic Nerve:

The optic nerve transports to the brain the image from the retina. Elevated pressure in the eye causes damage of the optic nerve, which is called glaucoma. Diabetics are 1.5 times more likely to develop glaucoma.

How can I tell if diabetes is affecting my eyes?

There is almost never any pain associated with diabetic eye disease and vision may not change until the disease is in an advanced stage. The only way to find out if diabetes has affected your eyes is to have a full eye exam by an eye care specialist. It is recommended that people with diabetes get their eyes checked at least once a year.

What can I do to protect my eyes?

Your risk of diabetic eye disease can be greatly reduced by tightly controlling your blood sugar and by treating your high blood pressure if you have it. You can control your blood sugar with a good diet as recommended by your doctor, regular exercise, and by taking your diabetic medicine. The closer your blood sugar is to normal levels, the less likely you are to develop diabetic eye disease.

Can diabetic eye disease be treated once it develops?

Yes. Today we have an amazing range of tools to diagnose and treat diabetic eye disease. We are very effective at stopping the progression of the disease, and in some cases, reversing the damage and restoring vision already lost to diabetic eye disease. The earlier we detect the effects of diabetes to your eye, the greater chance we have for preserving and restoring vision.

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