Diabetes is a complex metabolic disease in which the pancreas doesn’t produce enough, or any amount of insulin, resulting in excess levels of sugar in your blood. Insulin helps break down sugar (glucose) that provides energy to your body. When your body doesn’t produce enough insulin, it can affect the eye, including the retina, vitreous, lens, and the optic nerve.
When your blood sugar levels are high due to diabetes, it can affect your eyes and vision directly. It can change the fluid levels or cause swelling in the tissues in your eyes, resulting in blurry vision. In the short-term, you may experience blurred vision until your glucose levels are back to normal.
But if your glucose levels remain high for a long period of time, it can damage the blood vessels behind your eyes, leading to fluid or blood leak and swelling. This condition is often diagnosed at the prediabetes stage, when your glucose levels are higher than usual, but not high enough to cause damage. These damaged blood vessels are subsequently replaced with new, weak blood vessels that have a chance of bleeding into the center of your eye, resulting in scarring, or exorbitantly high pressure inside your eyes causing more damage.
Diabetes, can play havoc with your eyes, and sometimes there are no early sump toms. So you may have no idea anything is wrong until your eyesight is in danger.
Here are the main eye problems that can be caused, or made worse, by diabetes.
Cataracts
These are often described as a clouding of the lens of the eye. They are treatable by surgery in most cases.
Glaucoma
Our eyes are largely made up of fluid, and when the pressure of that fluid builds up too much inside the eye, you have glaucoma. Left untreated, it can damage the optic nerves, and even lead to blindness.
Diabetic retinopathy
Lining the back of our eyes is light-sensitive tissue known as the retina. The retina contains very small blood vessels that can be damaged by diabetic retinopathy. Sometimes there are symptoms, such as blurred vision, but often you won’t even know anything is wrong until the condition is well advanced. In the worse case, it leads to blindness.
Early detection is the key to battling all of these conditions, and the best diagnostic tool available is the dilated eye examination. This is a test in which special eye drops temporarily enlarge your pupils, allowing the doctor to see the back of your eyes. This test (which is painless) can detect cataracts, glaucoma or diabetic retinopathy in their early, treatable stages.
Eyesight is precious, so if you have diabetes, do yourself a favor and make an appointment for your dilated eye examination. And then do it again every year from now on.
Follow these steps now to make sure you take care of your vision in the years to come.
- Get a comprehensive eye checkup done by your ophthalmologist at least once a year
- Control your blood sugar levels by following a doctor-advised diet and drinking lots of clear fluids
- Maintain and check your blood pressure and cholesterol levels from time to time
- If you’re a smoker, quit smoking and limit the consumption of alcohol
- Add physical exercise to your daily routine and stay as active as possible
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