Diabetic retinopathy and macular edema can be prevented and protect your vision by taking some simple precautionary measures.
How do you prevent/stop a progression of retinopathy?
You can protect your eye vision from retinopathy and macular edema by following some simple steps; they are:
- The first step to prevent onset and progression of retinopathy is controlling your blood-glucose level as close as possible to the normal range.
- If hypertensive, you need to manage it near normal range by lifestyle change or with medication.
- If Pregnant your chance of retinopathy is more, thus frequently eye exam and take necessary care to prevent retinopathy.
- If high cholesterol, try to maintain it near normal, which helps to prevent retinopathy, to some extent.
- Smoker should quit smoking to control the blood pressure and indirectly help to prevent retinopathy.
- Type 2 diabetes and user of the medicine rosiglitazone (Avandia, Avandamet, and Avandaryl); discuss your doctor to change to some other medication to protect yourself from retinopathy.
- Benefit of dietary omega-3 fatty acids in protecting against the development and progression of retinal disease.
- Careful about Stress, if stress your body produces hormones that prevent diabetes medication to work properly and make the things worse. Learn relaxation techniques to overcome stress.
- Careful on vision change - there may be an immediate vision change, if so go for dilated eye exam test for earlier diagnosis and treatment.
If you have, diabetes gets a comprehensive dilated eye exam at least once a year and remembers:
- Proliferative retinopathy can cause vision loss without any symptom.
- Macular edema develops without a symptom at any stage of retinopathy.
- Both proliferative retinopathy and macular edema develops at any time, and still you can see fine. However, you are at high risk for vision loss.
- Eye care professional can diagnose macular edema or any stage of diabetic retinopathy, whether you have symptoms or not. Early detection and treatment can prevent vision loss.
If have diabetic retinopathy, then may need an eye exam more often. People with proliferative retinopathy can reduce their risk of blindness by 95 percent with timely treatment and appropriate follow-up care.