Retinal Eye Screening Clinic
Retinal eye screening at the Humberstone Medical Centre takes place annually, and diabetic patients will be called to attend this service at the surgery.
This is part of a national programme aimed at picking up the early stages of diabetes-related eye disease and preventing loss of vision.
The diabetes eye screening service offers everyone with diabetes from the age of 12 upwards the opportunity to be screened for diabetic eye disease using an assessment of vision and digital photographs of the back of the eye (the retina). This will not pick up every single case of diabetes-related eye disease, but will discover the great majority of cases and can also discover other eye related conditions.
Each year the screening programme is responsible for discovering sight-threatening eye disease in hundreds of Leicestershire people. As a result treatment is arranged with the aim of preventing deterioration in vision.
The eye screening programme aims to pick up eye damage at a stage when treatment has the best chance of working. If it is given at the right stage, laser treatment is effective at reducing loss of sight due to diabetes. This stage usually occurs well before diabetes has had any effect on eyesight. Diabetes does not usually affect eyesight until the changes are well progressed which is why screening is important.
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