Manhattan Eye Specialists

One of the worst — and most common — side effects of diabetes is vision loss. The disease attacks the small blood vessels in the back of your eyes, called the retinas. When your retina becomes damaged, it’s called diabetic retinopathy. It’s absolutely vital that you get yearly diabetic eye exams when you have diabetes.

When you have this blood sugar disorder, you’re also at a greater risk of developing glaucoma. Too often, you won’t even notice the damage until it’s too late, which is why you must begin to get annual eye checkups as soon as you receive a diabetes diagnosis. As difficult as life can be with diabetes, it’s even more difficult if you’re also blind.

How Diabetes Affects Your Eyes

While you do have a higher risk of going blind if you have diabetes, it’s not certain. Most diabetes sufferers, in fact, merely develop minor vision disorders, especially when problems are discovered early and you manage your diabetes well. You’re about 40 percent more likely to develop glaucoma than someone who doesn’t have diabetes. And the older you get, the higher your risk increases. You’re also at a 60 percent higher risk of developing cataracts.

Diabetic retinopathy is the umbrella term for all diabetes-related eye disease. The primary reason they occur is because high blood sugar levels affect your retina by creating tiny aneurysms that eventually leak blood. New blood vessels grow to replace the damaged ones, but they too weaken and leak. It’s these hemorrhages that cause permanent damage to your retina and lead to blindness.

Diabetes also can damage the cranial nerves that control eye movement, which can lead to double vision and other eye disorders. People with diabetes also are at a higher risk of developing infections because the disease targets your immune system. Conditions like eye styes and pink eye are more common among people with diabetes.

The Diabetic Eye Exam

As part of your routine diabetic eye exam — as well as during extra exams you may undergo when you have diabetes and are trying to reduce your risks of eye diseases — you read the Snellen chart, which is a chart of random letters of differing sizes. This allows your eye doctor to check your visual capabilities.

Then you’re asked to put your head back so the doctor can place eye drops in your eyes that dilate your pupils. Dilation allows your eye specialist to look at the back of your eyes. While not painful, you may feel a slight stinging from the drops, as well as a metallic taste in your mouth. Your ophthalmologist then relies on a magnifier and light to look at the back of your eyes to check for diabetic damage. In addition to your retina, the doctor examines your optic nerve and the blood vessels in the middle and front parts of your eyes.

The next step involves using the silt lamp to gauge the health of your eye’s surface. This too is a common step taken in routine eye exams. Finally, as your doctor is monitoring the effect of diabetes on your eyes, he may take some photographs of the various parts of your eye for further examination and to have for comparison on your next visit.

Diabetes and eye care go hand in hand. You should monitor blood sugar levels for periods of up to three months in a row before the eye doctor can appoint suitable lenses to take into account any loss of vision that you have. Although your doctor may eventually turn to an ophthalmologist for diabetic eye exams, you do not need to wait. The earlier you get into the exam procedure, the higher the probability that you will catch the problems earlier and protect your eyesight.

More info:
https://www.eyedoctorophthalmologistnyc.com/procedures/diabetic-eye-exam/

Manhattan Eye Specialists
51 East 25th Street, Ste 401
New York, NY 10010
(212) 533–4821
https://www.eyedoctorophthalmologistnyc.com/

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Saba Khodadadian

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Manhattan Eye Specialists, 51 East 25th Street, Ste 401, New York, NY 10010, (212) 533–4821 https://www.eyedoctorophthalmologistnyc.com/

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