*Cue major eye roll.*
There’s a slippery slope when it comes to prevention.
On the one hand, it’s super important to be vigilant about your health. Type 1 diabetics are at risk for blindness, heart disease, amputation, and more. To prevent all of this from happening, many healthcare professionals recommend their patients to have routine checkups.
On the other hand, these routine check-ups can be an absolute waste of time and money for some people. Not everyone is on the verge of losing a foot or going blind. People who take better care of their glucose levels can postpone the decline in their health, so they may not need as many checkups.
Researchers sought to find a way to be able to officially come out and say: “No, not everyone needs annual checkups.”
And boy are they excited to finally be able to say that.
Thirty years ago, a study involving 1,400 people who were diagnosed with type 1 diabetes (T1D) was born.
Retinal photographs of the participants were taken every six months for the first 10 years of the study until 1993.
After that, in a long-term follow-up study, photographs were taken every four years until 2012. Entire medical histories were maintained for the participants during that time.
This massive amount of data was able to paint a clear picture for the authors of the study. Unlike what had previously been assumed, they found that not everyone diagnosed with T1D is destined to eye failure.
They determined that participants who were able to keep their blood sugar levels below the 6% mark and showed no signs of retinopathy could skip the annual screening, as previously recommended. Instead, they suggested that these lower-risk patients could undergo the screening once every four years.
This comes at a helpful time as health insurance laws are wildly swinging in the United States. Insurance companies may not have the same coverage as the previous years, and so eye screenings may no longer be part of the plan.
If you feel like perhaps you fall into this category and the screenings are an additional cost to you, talk to your doctor about whether or not you need to continue with annual screenings.
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WebMD. URL Link. Accessed April 20, 2017.
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