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Yearly eye exams are important for everyone but are especially important for individuals with diabetes. Many people don’t realize the potential threat that diabetes can pose to your eyes. Diabetes affects your eyes when your blood glucose, also called blood sugar, is too high. Excess blood sugar damages the body’s smallest blood vessels and impairs blood flow, which starves the tissues that capillaries feed. This leads to leaking blood vessels, swelling and other dire complications.

In short term, most people don’t experience vision loss from high blood sugar. People may have blurry vision for a few days or weeks when they’re changing their diabetes care plan or medicines. High blood sugar can change fluid levels or cause swelling in the tissues of your eyes, causing blurred vision. This type of blurry vision is temporary and goes away when your blood sugar normalizes.

Long term, if your blood sugar stays high, it can damage the tiny blood vessels in the back of your eyes. This damage can begin during prediabetes when blood sugar is higher than normal, but not high enough for you to be diagnosed with diabetes. Damaged blood vessels may leak fluid and cause swelling. New, weak blood vessels may also begin to grow. These blood vessels can bleed into the middle part of the eye, lead to scarring, or cause dangerously high pressure inside your eye, leading to various eye diseases such as diabetic retinopathy, diabetic macular edema, cataracts, and glaucoma.

See your eye doctor immediately if you notice sudden changes to your vision, including flashes of light, more spots (floaters) than usual, and if it looks like a curtain is pulled over your eyes.

Read more at https://www.allaboutvision.com/conditions/diabetes-eye-health/.