OVERVIEW
The high rate of eye problem in our society is becoming alarming. Our visual impairment don’t just happen, it builds up with time and only get noticed after causing some damages to our sight. For what we know, common reasons to our eye problems are related to excessive usage of our phones.
Spending much time on the screen with direct bright light entering our eyes especially in a poorly lit environment. And of course, what we eat. While we’re carried away with our daily activities and feel less concerned to go for eye check-up, we could be causing another harm to our eyesight by not managing the symptoms of other well-known disease like diabetes; hence, diabetic retinopathy.
TYPES OF DIABETES
According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” Diabetes is a chronic (long-lasting) disease that affects how your body turns food into energy. There are three main types of diabetes: type 1, type 2, and gestational diabetes (diabetes while pregnant)”.
In a lay man’s understanding, after you’ve eaten food, your body needs to break it down and convert them to glucose which is then release into your bloodstream as energy. That you can go about doing your daily activities is as the result of the energy being released into your bloodstream after this process. Hence, we need food.
Whenever the pancreas release insulin, the insulin activates the sugar(glucose) in your blood to be used as energy. Now the issue of diabetes is when your pancreas could not produce enough insulin to “authorize” the blood sugar to be used as energy for the body. When this happens, the sugar in your bloodstream becomes excessive and leads to diseases such as vision loss, heart and kidney diseases.
WHAT IS DIABETIC RETINOPATHY
As defined by NHS,:” Diabetic retinopathy is a complication of diabetes, caused by high blood sugar levels damaging the back of the eye (retina). It can cause blindness if left undiagnosed and untreated.”. One will ask, what is the relation between diabetes and vision loss. Well, the retina which is at the back of the eye converts light into electrical signals then send it to the brain for interpretation.
That’s when your brain tells you what you’re seeing. The retina can’t really function well when the blood supply from the vessels are not enough. One main reason why this may occur is because of high blood sugar in your bloodstream. Hence the result of diabetic retinopathy.
WHO CAN EASILY DEVELOP DIABETIC RETINOPATHY
From the explanation above, it’s clear that any diabetic patient can easily develop diabetic retinopathy.
Also, people having high blood pressure or high cholesterol level are prone to the disease.
SYMPTOMS OF DIABETIC RETINOPATHY
Some of the symptoms of this disease are just any eye problem you may have such as eye redness, blurredness, not able to see well in the dark or general difficulty in vision.
These of course are just symptoms, proper eye screening needs to be conducted before concluding if it’s diabetic retinopathy or not. Considering the fact that it takes many years for it to develop into a stage where it can lead to blindness, mere having issue with your vision should not be concluded in a hurry.
TREATMENT OF DIABETIC RETINOPATHY
The best medication for diabetic retinopathy is to avoid it by properly manage/treat diabetes. Once you can manage your diabetes, it won’t certainly generate to the level of retinopathy. And the continuation of the treatment can still be helpful if it has already developed.
Another way is to use laser treatment and by surgery. This is a method must of us won’t want to try because of the extra cost involve.