Adolescents with diabetes experiencing decrease in retinopathy

A long-term study from Australia has claimed that there has been a significant reduction in the number of cases of retinopathy among young patients with type 1 diabetes who have had intensive glycaemic control therapy.
The research, which is to be published next month in Diabetes Care, helped to confirm previous works that have identified a link between a reduction in kidney, eye and nerve damage and normalised blood glucose levels.
The scientists examined data from 1,604 adolescents and teenagers between 1990 and 2009 to understand the relationship between the frequency of retinopathy and glucose control therapy that was more than the usual one or two insulin injections per day. They showed a steady reduction in the onset of retinopathy with increasing numbers of patients that had multiple daily injections or continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion.
The prevalence of retinopathy was shown to go down by 53 per cent for 342 of the patients examined between 1990 and 1994 to 38 per cent of the 517 patients examined between 1995 and 1999. There was also a 23 per cent retinopathy prevalence shown for the 604 patients examined between 2000 and 2004, as well as a 12 per cent prevalence shown in the 567 patients evaluated between 2005 and 2009.