Damage to the eyes from diabetes

Diabetes is a very scary disease. Many diabetic patients will be very scared once they know they have diabetes, because diabetes is very torturous. Diabetes is prone to various complications, so we must do a good job of preventing diabetes, as diabetes can easily cause problems with our body organs.

Diabetes can cause great harm to the eyes. If we do not control diabetes in time, it may cause us to develop some eye diseases. Let’s take a look at the introduction below.

Retinopathy

Retinopathy is the most common serious diabetic eye disease, often resulting in vision loss or blindness. According to statistics, 50% of people with diabetes for about 10 years may develop this disease, and the number reaches 80% for those with more than 15 years. The more severe the diabetes and the older the age, the higher the chance of developing the disease. This disease is the consequence of diabetic microangiopathy. Because diabetes causes damage to the walls of retinal capillaries and the blood is in a hypercoagulable state, it is easy to cause thrombosis and blood stasis, and even blood vessel rupture.

The National Diabetes Council reports that people with diabetes are 25 times more likely to go blind than people without diabetes. Today, diabetic retinopathy has become one of the four leading causes of blindness after age-related retinopathy. However, the effect of early treatment of diabetic retinopathy is still relatively ideal, and the cost of early prevention is much lower than the cost of late treatment. Therefore, it is particularly important for diabetic patients to prevent eye diseases, which can effectively avoid or delay the occurrence of eye diseases.

cataract

Cataracts caused by diabetes account for as much as 60% of the total number of cataract patients. The chance of surgery is much higher than that of other cataract patients, and generally requires surgical treatment. Animal experiments have confirmed that hyperglycemia can cause cataracts both in vivo and in vitro. We must pay great attention to this. Diabetic cataracts include true diabetic cataracts and diabetic senile cataracts. Cataracts that occur in adolescents with diabetes are called true diabetic cataracts. This disease is rare in clinical practice. The clinical manifestations of the disease are usually that the disease affects both eyes of the patient and progresses rapidly. In these patients, cataracts can fully mature within a few days or even within 48 hours. When elderly people develop diabetes, the degree and speed of lens opacity will increase and accelerate, leading to diabetic senile cataracts.

Fluctuating refractive error

Many patients do not know that they have diabetes at first. After a period of time, they may find that they have suddenly become nearsighted and cannot see clearly at a distance, but can see clearly at close range. In fact, this is diabetic eye disease. So the patient went to get glasses, and they worked fine at first, and his vision returned to normal within a few days. At this time, if you check your blood sugar several times, there will definitely be peaks and troughs, which is the fluctuating increase in blood sugar.

When diabetes develops suddenly or the condition worsens suddenly, the increase in blood sugar will cause a decrease in aqueous humor osmotic pressure, causing the patient to suddenly develop myopia. When blood sugar rises sharply, the patient may suddenly change from emmetropia to myopia, or the original presbyopia symptoms may be alleviated. The pathogenesis is increased blood sugar and blood;. When blood sugar drops, the patient may return to emmetropia or may need to wear reading glasses again. It can be seen that fluctuating blood sugar levels can cause fluctuating changes in vision. Refractive changes are generally temporary and do not require glasses. Once blood sugar is satisfactorily controlled, the refractive level can often return to the original level. However, the disease is characterized by rapid onset and slow recovery.

Open-angle glaucoma

Diabetes can easily cause open-angle glaucoma, also known as chronic simple glaucoma. This type of glaucoma is more common in middle-aged people and above, but can also occur in young people. It is often bilateral, with a slow onset, a gradual increase in intraocular pressure, and an open angle. There are usually no obvious symptoms and it is often not discovered until the late stages when there is significant damage to vision and visual field. Therefore, early diagnosis is very important.

There is no obvious discomfort in the early stage of this disease. When it develops to a certain extent, there will be mild headache, eye pain, blurred vision and halo vision, which will disappear on their own after rest, so it is easy to mistakenly believe that it is caused by visual fatigue. Central vision can remain unchanged for a considerable period of time, but visual field defects can occur very early, and finally the optic nerve gradually atrophies due to long-term high intraocular pressure. The field of vision shrinks, disappears, and eventually leads to blindness. During the entire course of the disease, there are no obvious external signs in the eyes. Only in the late stage will the pupil be slightly dilated and the iris atrophy.

Oculomotor nerve palsy

Diabetes can cause arteriosclerosis, resulting in ischemia of small blood vessels supplying the eyelid nerves. In addition, some diabetic patients experience oculomotor nerve paralysis, causing extraocular muscle movement disorders and diplopia, such as abducens nerve paralysis or oculomotor nerve paralysis. For example, some elderly people may suddenly experience drooping eyelids and be unable to open their eyes. Many people think that this is an eye disease or muscle weakness, and they undergo long-term acupuncture, physical therapy, infusion and other treatments, which delays the best and correct treatment time.

Ischemic optic prosthesis

Also known as vascular pseudopapillitis, it is more common in the elderly, and the disease may occur in one or both eyes successively. The clinical manifestations of this disease are mainly sudden changes in vision and visual field. Vision suddenly becomes blurred and deteriorates to blindness; the visual field is initially a fan-shaped defect below the nose, and then expands into hemianopsia or centripetal narrowing, which is sometimes connected to the physiological blind spot. This is due to circulatory disorders in the small blood vessels that nourish the anterior segment of the optic nerve, occlusion of the recurrent branch of the posterior ciliary artery, or involvement of the optic nerve pia mater vessels, resulting in insufficient blood supply to the optic disc, acute ischemia, hypoxia and edema. If the intraocular pressure is too low or too high, the perfusion pressure of the small blood vessels in the optic disc will lose balance with the intraocular pressure, which can also cause optic disc edema.

Iridocyclitis

Some diabetic patients, especially adolescent diabetic patients, may experience symptoms of acute iridocyclitis such as eye pain, red eyes, photophobia, tearing, blurred vision, etc.

Diabetic eye disease

Above, we introduced the harm that diabetes can cause to patients. We know that diabetes is a very terrible disease. Diabetes is prone to complications. If we do not control diabetes well, then diabetes can easily cause damage to various organs in our body. The above article introduces in detail the damage that diabetes can cause to the eyes.