When and How Often Should I Be Screened for Diabetic Retinopathy?

If you have diabetes, protecting your vision starts with regular eye exams—even if your vision seems perfectly fine. In this video, Dr. Stuart Burgess explains why screening for diabetic retinopathy is so important, when you should begin exams based on your type of diabetes, and how early detection can help prevent serious vision loss or even blindness.

Hello, I’m Dr. Stuart Burgess from the Fort Lauderdale Eye Institute, and today I’d like to talk to you about screening for diabetic retinopathy.

Now, it’s very important to be screened because often there are changes early on with no symptoms, and we need to find these changes and treat them often in order to prevent visual loss, because diabetic retinopathy left untreated can lead to blindness, and in fact is one of the leading causes of blindness.

So when should you be screened?

In general, it’s recommended that type 1 diabetics start their screening approximately five years after the diagnosis.

And that’s because it takes some time for diabetic retinopathy to develop, and we do know when type 1 diabetics become diabetic.

Whereas with type 2 diabetes, this is often diagnosed late, and somebody may have had type 2 diabetes undiagnosed for years.

So we recommend that any person diagnosed with type 2 diabetes have an eye exam right after the diagnosis because there can be findings at that time.

Now, once you’ve been screened, based upon the findings, further screenings can be determined at that point. But all diabetics should be screened at least annually from the time of the initial screening.