Undoubtedly, the eye is one of nature’s most precious gifts. It permits us to do all sorts of tasks like reading, working or watching television. But imagine having vision like this:
Turn into this:
That’s what diabetic retinopathy does. In 2010, there were 126.6 million people with this condition, 37.3 million of which suffer from its vision-threatening stage.
This disease is caused by diabetes. If you have diabetes for 20 years or more, you have an 80% chance of developing diabetic retinopathy, a disease with no cure.
So what if you have it? Are you screwed? No, there’s hope.
Screening
Since there’s no cure for the disease, the next best thing is treating and slowing down the disease. To be able to do that in the first place, we have to know that we have it.
In developed nations, such as the UK or the United States, screening is done every 1 to 2 years. This allows optometrists to catch the disease early, even before symptoms develop, to treat it as quickly as possible. But developing countries don’t have that luxury.
Currently, Diabetic Retinopathy is the leading cause of blindness in developing nations. Why? The optometrists per capita for developing nations is too low, and the accessibility to those optometrists is just unfeasible for many people.
Let’s fix that…
Note to reader: There’s going to be a tone shift, I tend to write rather informally for technical stuff.