Relation of Ocular and Systemic Factors to Survival in Diabetes

Diabetic retinopathy in newly diagnosed middle-aged and elderly diabetic patients. Prevalence and interrelationship with microalbuminuria and triglycerides

“…Triglycerides or total cholesterols predict proliferative retinopathy [28] and retinal hard exudates [13], but not the severity or incidence of DR [13,27] To make matters even more complex, both renal involvement, e.g. as expressed by ACR [44], and severity of DR [17] affect survival rate in type II diabetes. It is facile to explain this chicken-and-egg problem by assuming renal involvement and DR to be parallel disease processes.…”

Preventive Eye Care in People With Diabetes Is Cost-Saving to the Federal Government: Implications for health-care reform

“…In our model, each individual is assessed for disease progression and mortality in an age-specific (29), diseaseduration-specific, and disease-severityspecific manner (30)(31)(32)(33). Individuals undergoing screening, according to the Preferred Practice Pattern for Diabetic Retinopathy of the American Academy of Ophthalmology (34), are assessed for the presence of proliferative retinopathy and macular edema using published sensitivities for ophthalmic examination (35,36).…”

“…(29)(30)(31)(32)(33) No retinopathy = (5.0% + [2 • age-specific mortality])/2 Background retinopathy = (6.0% + [2 • age-specific mortality])/2 Macular edema = (7.6% + [2 • age-specific mortality])/2 Proliferative retinopathy = (9.2% + [5 • age-specific mortality])/2 2. Annual incidence of progression by years of type II diabetes, insulin-treated (23) Progression to background retinopathy 0-4 years = 6.8% 5-9 years = 17.7% 10-14 years = 13.6% 15 years + = 9.6% Progression to proliferative retinopathy 0-4 years = 0.0% 5-9 years = 1.3% 10-14 years = 1.4% 15 years + = 4.0% Progression to macular edema 0-4 years = 4.6% 5-9 years =12.5% 10-14 years = 9.6% 15 years + = 8.0% 3.…”

Does diabetic retinopathy increase the incidence of intraoperative complications of phacoemulsification surgery?

“…It has been estimated that up to 20% of all cataract surgery is performed on DM patients [2]. Previous studies have shown an association between the development of cataracts and duration of DM [3][4][5]. Besides reducing visual acuity, cataracts in DM patients interfere with adequate examination of the retina and makes photocoagulation of diabetic retinopathy more difficult.…”