Diabetic retinopathy, a severe sight-threatening complication of diabetes mellitus, accounts for a large number of cases of acquired, yet potentially avoidable, blindness.
Bullous keratopathy (BK), a severe sight-threatening disorder can have a variety of etiologies such as prophylactic laser iridotomy, intraocular surgery, trauma, and other ocular disorders.
1 The two major sight-threatening complications of DR are diabetic macular oedema (DMO) and proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR). 2 3 PDR is characterised by growth of new blood vessels that can cause severe sight loss as a result of vitreous haemorrhage, retinal detachment and neovascular glaucoma (NVG).
6 Perhaps even more noteworthy is the large geographical variation found to exist in rates of severe sight impairment and sight impairment, with an 11-fold difference found to exist between the highest and lowest rate, according to 2008/2009 data.
A significant geographical variation also exists across England in certification rates of severe sight impairment and sight impairment.
Patients can be certified as sight impaired (SI formerly 'partial sighted') or severe sight impairment (SSI formerly 'blind') (see box 1 for an overview of criteria).
There are tens of thousands of veterans currently battling severe sight loss without support.
He was able to achieve all of those accomplishments in spite of having to cope with severe sight impairment for more than 50 years.
The retina eventually weakens over time and causes severe sight loss, leading to total blindness.
20 These patients often experience severe sight loss after discharge but need to be referred back into the hospital eye service for certification when their vision declines.
Diabetic Macular Oedema (DMO) is one of the leading causes of blindness in the working-age population [ 1, 2] In the UK, 17.7 % of severe sight impairment certifications in adults aged 16 64 has been attributed to diabetes [ 3].
