Diabetes can cause retinopathy

MedPage Today (6/11, Phend) reported that, according to a study presented at the American Diabetes Association meeting, "retinopathy now affects more than a third of all diabetes patients." Jinan Saaddine, MD, MPH, of the CDC, and colleagues found that the prevalence of diabetic retinopathy in "349 participants age 40 and older who had self-reported diabetes" was 34.3 percent and appeared "to increase across racial and ethnic groups between the 1988-1994 and 2005-2006 iterations of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey," with "non-Hispanic blacks" having "the highest prevalence of diabetic retinopathy, and the greatest increase." The investigators said that "duration of diabetes" was "one of the major risk factors," with "every five additional years of diabetes duration" increasing "the odds for diabetic retinopathy by 60 percent." Other risk factors included "male sex; higher severity of diabetes, indicated by use of insulin and oral diabetes treatments versus pills alone...or use of pills alone versus no treatment; higher average systolic blood pressure," and "higher hemoglobin A1c." (courtesy AOA)