Science / Medicine : Control Is Key for Diabetics

Diabetics who are able to control their blood-sugar levels well are much more likely to keep their eyesight than those whose levels are poorly controlled, a study suggests. Thousands of people with diabetes go blind each year because of a condition linked to the disease called retinopathy, in which tiny blood vessels at the back of the eye break and bleed, usually painlessly and over a period of years.

The condition afflicts both people who get diabetes as adults and those who get it at younger ages, say researchers at the University of Wisconsin, who studied both groups over a four-year interval. The researchers used blood sugar-levels to divide the 1,800 subjects into four categories and found that those in the highest-level category developed signs of retinopathy almost twice as often as subjects in the lowest category.

This was true of all subjects taking insulin, whether they got the disease before or after age 30, the researchers reported in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.