3 Facts about Diabetic Eye Exams

Diabetes can wreak havoc all over your body, including in your eyes. This is because diabetes can damage nerves and blood vessels, including the ones that feed and operate your eyes. At Champaign Eye Professionals, your Optometrist in Champaign, IL provides patients with a diabetes diagnosis with special diabetic eye exams that check for vision impairments and eye damage unique to this disease. Here are three things to know about diabetic eye exams:

1. How is a Diabetic Eye Exam Different from a Regular Eye Exam?

During the routine annual eye exam that everyone should have, your eye doctor will check for any irregularities, vision impairments, and eye conditions that you might have. If you need a new or updated prescription for glasses, contacts, eye drops, etc., your optometrist will provide those. During routine eye exams, your optometrist may even detect eye-specific symptoms of diabetes. It is not unusual for eye doctors to be the first ones to detect undiagnosed diabetes. Since diabetes can damage the eyes’ blood vessels and nerves more quickly, however, diabetic eye exams need to happen more often than once a year and focus on diabetes-specific eye damage to monitor the progression of the disease and protect vision for as long as possible.

2. What is the Optometrist Looking For?

Some of the conditions your Champaign optometrist will look for during a diabetic eye exam include:

• Diabetic retinopathy—damage to the blood vessels that feed the light-sensing retina.
• Diabetic macular edema—inflammation and swelling in the central part of the retina (the macula) that allows fine-detail vision.
• Glaucoma—Too much pressure buildup inside of the eye, which can impair the optic nerve

All of these conditions can cause vision loss, so it is important to work with your primary care physician and your eye doctor to get diabetes under control and monitor for anything that could harm your vision.

3. What Can I Expect at a Diabetic Eye Exam?

As with most standard eye exams, we still monitor visual acuity with eye reading charts and refraction testing to monitor for astigmatism. We will also dilate the eyes so that we can observe any changes in the back of your eyes with the ophthalmoscope. A diabetic eye exam also includes fluorescein angiography testing by injecting a fluorescent dye into the veins that will appear in the blood vessels in the back of the eye to monitor for macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy. Finally, check for glaucoma. Although glaucoma cannot be reversed, it can be slowed or halted, so catching it early is critical.

Visit the Optometrist Champaign, IL Trusts for Diabetic Eye Exams

Your Champaign Eye Professionals team can help you catch and manage eye conditions specific to diabetes, so make sure to schedule your eye exam today.