How often should I have my eyes checked if I have diabetes?

How often should I have my eyes checked if I have diabetes?

Anne Peters, MD, FACP, CDE (Professor and Director of Clinical Diabetes Programs, USC Keck School of Medicine) gives expert video advice on: What are the symptoms of type 2 diabetes?; When should I get emergency care if I have diabetes?; Why should I should I have my urine checked if I have diabetes? and more...

People with diabetes can get what's called "diabetic retinopathy" which is damage to the back of the eyes due to high blood sugar levels. Diabetic retinopathy is the leading cause of blindness in adults in the United States, so it's a very serious problem. A lot of my patients say to me, "Why do I need to get my eyes checked, my vision is fine?" The point is that your vision is not necessarily different and yet your eyes can be damaged and damaged and damaged and you won't know it until you go blind, or you bleed into the back of your eyes, or something horrible happens. So, everybody with diabetes should go every year to the eye doctor and get a dilated eye exam, which means they put drops in your eyes to make your pupils dilate and they then look in the back of your eyes very carefully to make sure there's nothing there. There are some people who are under very good control. Their haemoglobin A1C or average blood sugar test is in the normal range and if they don't have any changes in the back of their eye the eye doctor may say come back in two years. However, as a rule of thumb, I say go every year just to be sure that there's nothing there, because if there is something there they can treat it with laser therapy and things are fine.