Visual loss in patients with diabetic retinopathy not necessarily caused by disease, study suggests

A retrospective study suggests that visual impairment in patients with diabetic retinopathy may not necessarily be caused by any distinctive disease-specific process. Instead, visual loss in these patients may be primarily attributable to a generic outcome of the disease on their daily lives.

Lohrasb Ahmadian, MD, MPH, MSc, and Robert Massof, PhD, FAAO, studied reading, mobility, visual motor and visual information processing scores among 114 patients with diabetic retinopathy and compared results with measurements obtained for 114 control patients with other ocular diseases who were matched for age, sex, visual acuity and general health.

The patients averaged 67.5 years of age, ranging from 19 to 90 years.

The average logMAR visual acuity for the cohort was 0.7, the authors noted.

After adjusting probabilities for multiple comparisons, the investigators identified no statistically significant difference regarding any of the four functional vision measurements between patients with diabetic retinopathy and controls (P > .05).

In addition, they found no difference in goal-level vision-related functional ability and total visual ability between diabetic retinopathy patients and controls (P > .05).

"The result of this study is in contrast with a view sometimes expressed in diabetes care that visual loss interacts with diabetes to render the individual more vulnerable to the impact of vision loss," the authors said in the September issue of Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science.