Young people with diabetes in Wales need urgent sight-saving care

Diabetes retinopathy – damage to the blood vessels in the eye – is one of the most common diabetes complications amongst older people with diabetes . However, many young people are also requiring urgent sight-saving treatment and this problem is particularly acute in Wales.
Diabetes complications are side-effects caused by diabetes over a period of time. With 160,000 people diagnosed with diabetes in Wales, many patients are thought to have developed diabetic complications in the last few years. Doctors now fear that diabetes patients are developing complications such as retinopathy at a younger age.
Opthalmologist Roger McPherson was works as a surgeon at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff was reported as saying: “We are seeing it in younger and younger patients. We used to be operating much more on people in their 50s and 60s but I’m getting a steady stream of people in their 20s and even in their late teens. We are not uncommonly treating people when vision in their second eye is going. The vision drops in one eye and they don’t seem to worry about it too much.”