Management and Treatment of Diabetic Retinopathy

Featuring Dr. Amit Gupta, MD, FACS, Ophthalmologist

Duration: 2 minutes, 32 seconds

Diabetic retinopathy, which can cause permanent damage to the eyes, can be controlled by first of all controlling the sugars. The best way to control sugars, you need to do three things: not just simply take your medication, that’s one thing. You take the medications the doctor prescribes. Some people think that’s enough—if they take the medications they’re fine.

But there are two other very important aspects of controlling. One is controlling your diet. If you don’t eat the sugar, it doesn’t cause a blood rise. That’s something that’s easily said, but it means controlling snacking. It means controlling high-carb intakes like rice or potatoes, and something people don’t realize, like corn. Corn makes corn syrup. Corn syrup comes from corn. Eating corn is like eating sugar cane. It causes the sugar to go up.

The third aspect of controlling diabetes is exercise. Exercise burns sugar. And one of the best times to exercise is immediately after a meal. Go for a walk. It doesn’t have to be super vigorous, but burn that sugar that you just ate. It’ll help control the high sugars in the bloodstream.

Diabetic retinopathy, once it occurs, can be treated by various ways. Nowadays, we are very fortunate to have in our arsenal, the availability of medications that are injected into the eye.

Now that sounds very horrific, but it’s not as bad as it sounds. These medications are able to control that leakage of diabetes—the damage, the bleeding, the growth of new blood vessels, and have made a world of difference in our ability to treat diabetes. So that would be the number one line of treatment anywhere nowadays.

Other treatments that are possible are laser, and they can be quite a bit of extensive laser, which was the standard of treatment before these medications became available. The third technique is surgery for diabetic retinopathy, which is now reserved for the most extreme cases that can’t be handled by injections or lasers.

If you want more information on this, talk to your optometrist, and if you have been referred to a retinal specialist or an ophthalmologist, you need to discuss with them what your options are and which ones are actually applicable to your situation.

Presenter: Dr. Amit Gupta, Ophthalmologist, Scarborough, ON

Local Practitioners: Ophthalmologist