Diabetic Retinopathy

What is diabetic retinopathy?

Diabetic retinopathy is an eye condition that causes blurry vision in people who have diabetes. Like other conditions that affect your sight, it requires timely treatment to avoid severe vision loss.

The best way to avoid developing diabetic retinopathy is to keep your blood sugar under control. Taking your medicine, eating healthy and being physically active can also reduce your chances of developing the condition.

Diabetic retinopathy can also lead to other serious eye conditions, including diabetic macular edema, neovascular glaucoma and retinal detachment. Anyone with diabetes can develop diabetic retinopathy, including women with gestational diabetes. Although your risk increases the longer you have diabetes, you can reduce it by controlling your blood sugar.

What causes it?

Diabetic retinopathy is caused by uncontrolled diabetes or elevated blood sugar levels. Like other blood vessels in the body, the blood vessels in your retina can be damaged by high blood sugar.

The retina is a thin piece of light-sensitive tissue at the back of your eye. It gathers the light entering your eye and sends that information to the brain via the optic nerve.

When the retina's blood vessels become damaged, they may begin to leak. In the early stages this is known as non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy. If the condition progresses to proliferative diabetic retinopathy, the eye begins to create new, poorly formed blood vessels. These fragile vessels tend to break and leak, and eventually scar tissue may form and cause a retinal detachment.

What are the symptoms?

If you have diabetes, your primary care doctor or endocrinologist will likely recommend routine diabetic eye exams. These visits are especially important because diabetic retinopathy often has few obvious symptoms in its early stages. The most common symptoms are:

• An increase in floaters
• Fluctuating vision
• Vision loss
• Dark or empty areas in your vision

What treatments are offered?

In the early stages, your eye doctor will closely monitor your eyes. Mild to moderate non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy usually does not require immediate treatment, but you will likely be seen more often than once a year to make sure the condition is not progressing. For more advanced cases, treatment usually begins right away.

Injections. The most common treatment is medication injected into the eye, delivering it directly to the source of the problem to prevent worsening and further vision loss.

Laser. In some cases laser procedures are recommended to reduce swelling in the retina and prevent the formation of new blood vessels.

Vitrectomy. For very advanced cases, a vitrectomy removes the gel that fills the eye, which can help prevent a retinal detachment.

Videos: understanding your condition and treatment

Patient-education videos from the American Academy of Ophthalmology. Captions are available with the CC button.