Helping to save your vision

Feb 12, 2017 News

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By Sharmain Grainger
It is said that the eyes are the gateway to the soul. I have no proof of this. What I do know, however, is that those of us who have the privilege of having our eyes intact may not be able to even imagine existing a single day without this precious asset.
Granted some people without vision have a relatively gratifying existence although they have never been able to witness the natural beauty of our awesome world or gazed upon the face of a loved one. But they were born that way!
However, imagine having been birthed into the world, lived for most of your life depending on your eyes to guide you around and then one day without warning you begin to lose your vision and possibly even go blind. Imagine too that the circumstance(s) leading to this dilemma was completely preventable but is instead irreversible.
This understandably could prove to be very disheartening and indeed it is to many people across the world who have lived with such a reality.
A significant number of people who become visually impaired or completely blind suffer from diabetic retinopathy. I was enlightened about this daunting state of affairs recently when I met with Retinal Surgeon, Dr. John Carter.
Dr. Carter, through a Non Governmental Organisation (NGO) called Orbis International, was during the past week a member of a team lending support to the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC) to help arrest the prevalence of complications linked to diabetic retinopathy.
While the health sector has a role to play to raise awareness and help treat conditions such as diabetic retinopathy, Dr. Carter asserted that individuals also have a responsibility to have their eyes checked regularly, especially those who have been diagnosed with diabetes.
Diabetes, not just in Guyana, but across the world, is a very common problem and thus many people have, over the years, loss their vision to it. This situation has amplified the importance of a vigorous programme to tackle preventable blindness.
The GPHC, according to its Head of Ophthalmology, Dr. Shailendra Sugrim, has already been putting considerable measures in place to help arrest the scourge of various eye diseases. But he too admitted that among the most challenging is that of diabetic retinopathy.
It is for this reason that the GPHC has been very receptive of the support from Orbis International.
But even with all the latest technology, knowledge and sufficient staff in place, tackling conditions such as diabetic retinopathy may not succeed if individuals do not seek medical attention.
According to Dr. Carter, if an individual delays seeking medical attention, it could result in them developing conditions that cannot be reversed, even when there are no signs or symptoms. And this has been the case on many occasions, Dr. Carter revealed.
Dr. Carter said that he is always in high praise for patients who take charge of their vision simply by showing up. In fact he spoke of attending to several patients during the past week at the GPHC who simply had no idea why they wanted to have their eyes examined. But when their eyes were examined it was found that they had a pretty advanced disease.
“If that advanced disease is ignored that patient is going to go blind…in such a situation we have a narrow opportunity to treat them before they go blind and they may be able to live a lot of good days with good vision before they go blind,” Dr. Carter explained.
But far too often several patients simply turn up for medical attention when it is too late.
“We have seen a fair number of patients whose disease is no longer treatable; they have loss of vision and that didn’t have to happen. They come to us hoping that we can fix it but we can’t,” Dr. Carter said.
As part of the effort to help improve the delivery of eye care at the GPHC, Dr. Carter said that he is hoping that Orbis International will sustain a collaborative relationship with GPHC for a very long time.
The mission of Orbis International, he said, is not just to work with the physicians, but to work with other personnel including nurses and technicians, sometimes even administrators, in order to realise efficient and effective health care. “So we take that very seriously,” he asserted.
According to Dr. Sugrim, deliberate efforts are consistently being made to improve available service to cater to diabetic retinopathy patients at the GPHC. In this regard, he said, staffers attached to the department have been benefiting from strategic training to treat diabetic patients.
According to reports, diabetic retinopathy is a potentially blinding complication of diabetes mellitus. Reasons for loss of vision are diabetic maculopathy. The macula is the part of the eye that helps to provide us with our central vision, and as such, diabetic maculopathy is when the macula sustains some form of damage.
Blindness can also result from complications of proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR) such as vitreous hemorrhage, tractional retinal detachment, and neovascular glaucoma.
Medical experts are of the firm belief that by 2030, developing countries will face an increase of this condition by 69 percent and industrialized countries by 20 percent of the number of patients with diabetes compared to 2010.
It has been noted too that the probability of retinal complications increases with increasing duration of disease. In up to 50 percent of patients with type one diabetes and 30 percent of those with type two diabetes, potentially vision-threatening retinal changes develop over time, while early retinal changes are not noticed by the patients. It is particularly for the latter reason that many people who have vision-threatening diseases seek medical attention too late and consequently become blind because of a lack of vision-saving treatment.

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