A Call for Awareness of Diabetic Eye Disease

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John Kitchens, MD, discusses the impact of diabetic eye disease and macular diabetic edema for patients on both a societal standpoint and an individual standpoint.

Dr Kitchens explains the process of how this disease forms in the back of the eye, what it looks like using Optical Coherence Tomography for imaging purposes and how PharmaCo therapies have had a significant impact on patients. According to Dr Kitchens, macular diabetic edema is the leading cause of vision loss for working age adults in the United States.

“Every day we see patients that come in with proliferative disease that have never been told that their eyes are affected by diabetes. The one thing they say is, ‘If I only knew that my eyes were affected by this, I would have gotten checked.’ And if they would’ve gotten checked, they would have gotten treated at a much, much earlier time frame,” Dr Kitchens said.

“The gap is narrowing a little bit more as we have these treatments that can actually turn back the clock on some of the retinopathy but at the same time, there are patients every day that I see that I wish I would’ve seen 6 to 12 months sooner so we could’ve saved some of their vision.”