When to Seek Treatment for Eye Trauma
If you’ve received a blow to the eye or gotten something in it, it may be minor, or it may threaten your vision. Here’s how you know when to seek treatment for eye trauma.
What Happens During a Diabetic Eye Exam?
Diabetic eye disease is a collection of problems that may affect people with diabetes. Over time, the high blood sugar levels of diabetes can damage your eyes and lead to poor vision or even blindness. However, you can take steps to prevent diabetic eye disease, or prevent it from getting worse, by treating the underlying condition.
At Retina Specialists, our expert team of board-certified ophthalmologists offers diabetic eye exams for our patients with any type of diabetes. This thorough checkup can ensure that your eyes remain healthy despite your condition. Here’s what you can expect when you come in.
What is diabetes?
Glucose is your body’s main source of energy, and it primarily comes from the food you eat.
Insulin is a hormone made by the beta cells in the pancreas that helps glucose enter the cells and be used for energy. If you have Type 1 diabetes, your body doesn’t produce enough insulin to break food down into glucose. In Type 2 diabetes, your cells become insulin-resistant.
In both cases, glucose remains in the blood, and it attacks a wide range of tissues, including the eyes, kidneys, nerves, and heart.
Gestational diabetes is a form of diabetes that develops specifically during pregnancy, and it usually goes away following delivery. However, the mother has a higher chance of developing Type 2 diabetes later in life.
How the eye sees
To understand what happens with diabetic eyes, it helps to know how the normal eye works. A tough outer membrane covers the eye, and it’s clear (to let light through) and curved (to focus the light). This is the cornea.
Once light moves through the cornea, it travels through the anterior chamber (filled with a protective aqueous humor), next through the pupil (a hole in the iris, the colored part of the eye), and then through a lens that refines the focus.
Finally, light passes through a second chamber, filled with vitreous humor, before hitting the back of the eye, where the retina resides.
The retina records the focused images and converts them into electrical signals, which it sends to the brain for processing via the optic nerve.
The central 2% of the retina sees the fine detail of your clear central vision. This tiny area is called the macula. Blood vessels running in and behind the retina nourish the macula.
Diabetes eye exams
The best way to determine if your diabetes is affecting your eyes is to have a full, dilated eye exam at least once a year. Your healthcare team may suggest it should be more or less frequently, depending on your type of diabetes and your medical history.
According to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, eye exam guidelines for diabetes indicate:
Type 1 diabetes
Yearly eye exams should start within five years of diagnosis.
Type 2 diabetes
Yearly eye exams should start immediately after diagnosis.
Pregnancy
Women who have either Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes need an eye exam before getting pregnant, or within the first three months. The doctor may want to repeat the exam later in the pregnancy and until your baby reaches age one.
Gestational diabetes
Women who develop gestational diabetes usually don’t require an eye exam because they don’t develop diabetic eye disease during their pregnancy.
The diabetic eye exam
In addition to testing your vision, intraocular pressure (IOP), corneal health, and the middle regions of the eye, the ophthalmologist looks all the way toward the back of the eye where the retina lies. There, they look for signs of three disease types common with diabetes:
1. Nonproliferative retinopathy
This is the most common form of retinopathy, where capillaries in the back of the eye balloon out and form pouches.
2. Macular edema
The capillary walls can lose integrity, leaking fluid into the macula, where focusing occurs; this causes swelling (edema). Vision becomes blurry, and you can lose it entirely if it’s not treated.
3. Proliferative retinopathy
In this advanced stage, the blood vessels are so damaged they seal themselves off, so new blood vessels start growing in the retina, but they’re weak and can leak blood, blocking vision. The new blood vessels can also form scar tissue. When it shrinks, it can distort the retinal surface or pull the tissue out of place, a condition called retinal detachment. It’s a leading cause of blindness.
The diabetic eye exam also includes tests for cataracts (cloudy lens) and age-related macular degeneration (AMD).
If you’re diabetic and haven’t had an eye exam yet this year, now’s the time to do it — for your sight and your overall health. Call Retina Specialists at any of our five Texas offices — in Dallas, DeSoto, Plano, Mesquite, and Waxahachie — to schedule a consultation with one of our specialists, or book online today.
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