Diabetic Eye Disease

Discovering the underlying cause of a white-centered hemorrhage is key to management  

Extensive testing, consultation with primary-care doctor key to proper treatment  

Non-eyecare practitioners will be screening your patients for diabetic retinopathy. Find out why this can help or hurt your patients and how you can help guide the process.

More than 9 percent of U.S. adults have diabetes, and those patients are sitting in your chair. Find out how diabetes affects your patients’ vision.

Patients with diabetes may need to add a dry eye workup to their health assessments. Scott Schwartz, OD, from Detroit, MI, discusses his poster, “Does diabetes make a difference in dry eye,” at ARVO 2018 in Honolulu.

ODs may wish to incorporate color vision testing when working with patients having diabetes. A. Paul Chous, MA, OD, FAAO, CDE, talks about the importance of these tests, incorporating them into day-to-day exams, and devices available.

Diagnosing and treating diabetic macular edema (DME) can pose a challenge for ODs. A. Paul Chous, OD, MA, FAAO, CDE, examines a case of non-center involved DME and the challenges he faced when treating one patient.

It is important for eyecare providers to be familiar with these new drugs and findings. We often see patients with diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and high CV risk, and we are in a position to help counsel our patients about new treatments-and even suggest that appropriate patients have conversations with their primary-care physicians, endocrinologists and cardiologists.

A 30-year-old female with a 16-year history of insulin-dependent diabetes and no other ocular or systemic conditions developed proliferative retinopathy in March 2015. She had not been closely followed for the previous five years.