New Discoveries of Diabetic Retinopathy

Sunday, December 13th, 2009 at 2:52 pm Post in Eye Diseases

According to some researchers in Saudi Arabia, cataract surgery can also help in slowing down the progression of diabetic retinopathy. These researchers injected bevacizumab into some patients’ eyes who received cataract surgery and found that there was a considerably low rate of diabetic retinopathy progression in the group that had received bevacizumab injection at the end of cataract surgery. Commercially known as Avastin, bevacizumab is an anti-cancer drug used off label to treat advanced age-related macular degeneration by preventing growth of abnormal blood vessels in the retina.

Published in the December issue of Archives of Ophthalmology in 2008, a study by US Centers for Disease Control and other researchers predicted that the number of diabetic retinopathy patients who are in their 40s and older would reach 16 million by 2050, which is a triple of the current figure. The study also estimated that vision-threatening diabetic eye disease cases will triple to 3.4 million at the same time. Without proper prevention and treatment, diabetes-related eye diseases will go further to spread.

A 25-year study by researchers at University of Wisconsin pointed out in 2008 that patients with type 1 diabetes may develop some forms of diabetic retinopathy. Since the study had spanned such a long period, it was possible to make a comparison between patients in different times. The study found that patients in recent times were less likely to get proliferative diabetic retinopathy. The probable reason was indicated to be the better and more modern management of blood sugar and blood pressure control. Other risk factors of diabetic retinopathy include higher body mass and male gender.

Mice experiments by University of Utah School of Medicine researchers found that active protein named Robo4 could prevent or reverse abnormal blood vessel growth in the retina. Destabilized or abnormally growing blood vessels can cause eye diseases such as diabetic retinopathy and macular degeneration. This result suggested a new way to treat these eye diseases by activating the Robo4 protein.