Diabetic eye disease is a group of eye issues can affect the people with diabetes. As a nurse, one should be aware of these eye diseases because diabetes and its comorbidities are not as uncommon as they used to be. Today, it is more likely that the nurse will attend to a patient with diabetes almost every day while on duty. This increasing number of diabetes cases makes it important for the nurse to learn about the diabetic eye disease.

Diabetic Eye Disease – An Overview:

The description of diabetic eye disease won’t be complete if it doesn’t include the statistics about diabetes. In the United States, about 26 million people are affected by diabetes (type 1 and 2). Everyone with this disorder are at greater risks of various complications over time. The most common of these complications is the eye disorders, which are collectively called as diabetic eye disease. The eye diseases that are known to be contracted by the people with diabetes include the following:

• Diabetic retinopathy
• Diabetic macular edema
• Cataracts
• Glaucoma

In due course, these eye diseases could cause damage to the patient’s eyes, which could result in poor vision or even blindness. Most often, they also won’t show any warning signs when they first occur. Only a complete dilated eye exam would help find and/or treat these diabetic eye diseases.

How does diabetes affect eyes?

Diabetes can affect the eyes when the blood glucose is too high in the affected patient. In the short-term, the affected person would not become blind due to high glucose levels. But, they would have blurry vision for a few days/weeks. This is because the high glucose levels would cause swelling in eye tissues, which lead to blurred vision. However, this type of eye problem would often go off when the patient’s glucose level comes to normal levels.

On the other hand, if the patient’s blood glucose levels remain at higher levels over time, it could damage the tiny blood vessels that are present at the back of the eyes. Most often, this kind of damage is found to start during the pre-diabetes stage itself. This means the damage would start in the person when his/her blood sugars are higher than normal, but not higher enough to be diagnosed with type-1 or type-2 diabetes. These damaged blood vessels could leak fluids, thereby, causing them to swell. There are possibilities for the new and weak blood vessels to grow. These could bleed in the eye’s middle part, thereby, leading to scars and high pressure inside the patient’s eye. It’s to be noted that most of the serious diabetic eye diseases would start with these blood vessel problems.

Diabetic Eye Disease Symptoms:

As mentioned earlier, one cannot see early symptoms for these diabetic eye diseases. The patient may feel no pain or change in his/her vision as these damages begin to occur inside their eyes. This is especially true with the diabetic retinopathy. If there are symptoms in the patients, they would probably be the following:

• Blurry/wavy vision
• Changing vision
• Vision loss
• Dark areas
• Diminishing color vision
• Spots
• Flashes of light

How can nurses help with diabetic eye disease?

Being a nurse, one could help the patient with diabetes and save him/her from contracting the diabetic eye disease by educating them on the following pointers:

• Encourage the patients of 30 years of age and above to undergo a thorough examination of their visual acuity and other aspects performed by the eye doctors. As a nurse, one should motivate the patients at their initial diagnosis of the disorder.
• It’s the duty of the nurses to educate the diabetic patients on the importance of ophthalmic routine examinations. As such, these examinations should be performed at least once in a year after the diagnosis of diabetes. It’s to be noted that the frequency of these examinations should be increased when the patient has something wrong with his/her eye.
• Nurses should ask their female diabetic patients to have frequent ocular examinations if they are trying to conceive or pregnant already. It’s because pregnancy could cause serious lesions in their eyes.
• As a nurse, she should encourage the patient to consult a medical professional as early as possible if the patient experiences a sudden loss of vision or blindness.
• Encourage the diabetic patients to pay attention to eye health alongside treating diabetes and ask them to take active treatment for eye diseases, so as to avoid vision loss.

Practicing nurses can help encourage the diabetic patients to actively engage in eye screening. As nurses, each and every one should understand their invaluable roles in patient education, so as to control eye diseases in diabetic patients at an early stage.