Diabetic Retinopathy: A Position Statement by the American Diabetes Association.

Abstract

Diabetic retinopathy diagnostic assessment and treatment options have improved dramatically since the 2002 American Diabetes Association Position Statement (1). These improvements include the widespread adoption of optical coherence tomography to assess retinal thickness and intraretinal pathology and wide-field fundus photography to reveal clinically silent microvascular lesions. Treatment of diabetic macular edema is now achieved by intravitreous injection of anti–vascular endothelial growth factor agents, and the same drugs are now used for proliferative diabetic retinopathy. Improvements in medications and devices for the systemic therapy of diabetes have also improved the ability of patients to optimize their metabolic control. This Position Statement incorporates these recent developments for the use of physicians and patients. Diabetic retinopathy is a highly specific neurovascular complication of both type 1 and type 2 diabetes, the prevalence of which strongly correlates to both the duration of diabetes and level of glycemic control. A pooled meta-analysis involving 35 studies conducted worldwide from 1980 to 2008 estimated global prevalence of any diabetic retinopathy and proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR) among patients to be 35.4% and 7.5%, respectively (2). Diabetic retinopathy is the most frequent cause of new cases of blindness among adults aged 20–74 years in developed countries. Glaucoma, cataracts, and other disorders of the eye occur earlier and more frequently in people with diabetes. In addition to diabetes duration, factors that increase the risk of or are associated with retinopathy include chronic hyperglycemia (3,4), nephropathy (5), hypertension (6), and dyslipidemia (7). Intensive diabetes management with the goal of achieving near-normoglycemia has been shown in large prospective randomized studies to prevent and/or delay the onset and progression of diabetic retinopathy (8,9). Lowering blood pressure has been shown to decrease retinopathy progression in people with type 2 diabetes, although tight targets (systolic blood pressure <120 mmHg) do …