One of the biggest problems for people with diabetes is controlling their blood sugar. They have to watch what they eat and continuously having to prick their finger to check their blood sugar. It’s a difficult disease to control, but if they don’t monitor their blood glucose, they could develop other health conditions such as vision loss. A new study finds that vision loss due to diabetes is rising globally and Latinos are at a higher risk to develop type 2 diabetes than others.
The study was published in the Diabetes Care journal by a global consortium led by researchers at Nova Southeastern University’s (NSU) College of Optometry in Fort Lauderdale/Davie, Florida, and the Vision and Eye Care Unit at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Researchers found that blindness and visual impairment due to diabetic retinopathy (DR) increased significantly in the 20-year period researchers analyzed. In 2010, one in every 39 blind people was blind due to DR, which increased 27 percent since 1990. Of those with moderate or severe vision impairment, one in 52 people had vision loss attributed to diabetes, an alarming increase of 64 percent since 1990.
