What You Need to Know About Diabetes and Blurred Vision

Woody Short

7 years ago

Struggling with diabetes and blurred vision? Learn why it happens and how you can prevent it.

Diabetes and blurred vision often occur together. What causes the blurred vision in people with diabetes seems to be fairly well understood although the reasons are varied and can produce very different levels of severity, prognosis and times that eyesight is effected.

These can go from temporary blurry vision after eating sugar, which resolves the same day, to permanent blindness caused by damage to the optic nerve. Diabetes and eyesight improvement involves regular check up by eye doctors and specific treatments.

Most of these treatments involve keeping up with your blood sugar levels (very low or high blood sugar can cause short term blurry vision), heathy changes in diet and exercise. If it’s good for managing your diabetes odds are that it will also have a positive effect on your diabetes and eyesight improvement.

Different glucose levels in the blood tend to affect liquids in and around the eye. These liquids can seep into the lens of the eye changing it’s functioning and effecting diabetes and blurred vision.

Changes in eyesight can also start after beginning insulin treatment because insulin treatment affects glucose levels in the blood which changes the movement of other liquids in the body including the eye.

Low blood sugar affects the vision by the impact that it has on the brain whereas high blood sugar affects vision by damaging blood vessels inside the eye and this can cause long term eyesight problems leading to difficulties in your diabetes and eyesight improvement.

Diabetic retinopathy is a term used to describe various diseases of the retina associated with diabetes.

Macular edema is one of these and is caused by leaking eye fluid affecting the macula, which is responsible for a human’s ability to see sharply in the center of their vision. Proliferative retinopathy is another diabetes and blurred vision disease and it’s caused by blood entering the center of the eye and causes different types of vision disturbances.

It has also been discovered that people with diabetes are at twice the risk for glaucoma compared to the general population. So there is a link between diabetes and eyesight improvement and glaucoma.

People with diabetes also have a stronger tendency to have cataracts which can have a significant effect on diabetes and blurred vision. Cataracts happens when the lens in the eye becomes blurry and physically allows less light into the eye. Increasing your intake of leafy green vegetables is often recommended to treat cataracts.

People with diabetes who experience disturbances in their vision should see an ophthalmologist.

Going to see an ophthalmologist is different than seeing an optician. An ophthalmologist is a specialist in the diseases of the eye and can diagnose and treatment problems that opticians cannot address.

Ophthalmologist do this partially by dilating the eye to be able to see inside it. This is the kind of regular eye check up that patients with diabetes are encouraged to have regularly.

Since people with diabetes often have high blood pressure controlling both is recommended for treating the vision problems caused by diabetes. Regular eye check ups are recommended because the earlier an ophthalmologist can detect a problem with the eye the more options there are and better the possible results of treatment for diabetes and blurred vision.

This is especially important compared to blurry vision after eating sugar because that tends to be a temporary and less serious issue. Treatments for diabetes and blurry vision tend to include injections in the eye, microsurgery to the eye and laser surgery.

However, as the old saying goes an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and diabetes and eyesight improvement is made all the better with knowledge of proper diet and exercise. However, if diabetes and blurry vision do happen, whether it be blurry vision after eating sugar or blood vessel damage risking your optic nerve, rest assured that diagnosis and treatments are available.