Abstract
Purpose :
Diabetic patients must be followed by an eye doctor at least once an year to examine the retina under dilatation of the pupil.Many family doctors miss this important guide line and even they ask patients to come for such examination, many of the patients do not come .. There are some populations that do not have the possibilty to be checked by an eye doctor. Their location is far from medical centers that have an eye doctor. Diabetic retinopathy is a very common condition over the whole world .It is considered to be one of the leading diseases which create blidness.The Diabetic Retinopathy(DR) condition reflects that the patient has no control of the glicemic levels in blood.The specialist doctor in diabetes must revaluate the treatment. Revealing the DR in an early stage is a very important preventive medicine protocol. We present here the use of telemedicine in achieving the goal to detect early DR in a population that is missing this examination
Methods :
The Meuhedet Medical Care Services Organization, which is one of the major organisations that supply medical care through the whole contry.It introduced in the last two years a service of an ambulatory mobile unit which can arrive in far peripheral locations. The unit has as pecial fundus camera that takes pictures of thevretina. This is a population of diabetic people who did not have eye examination in tha past. The mobile fundus camera has an option to take a wide angle picture of retina with no need to dilate the pupil. The picture is transmited to an eye doctor that evaluates the condition and writes the diagnosis and instructions direct in the personal file of the patient.
Results :
Starting the telemedicine June 2021 and untill the end of 2022 we screened a population of 535 diabetic patiens . We found 56 patients with Non Proliferative Diabetic Retinopathy with all the kind of stages of damage. This finding reveal that 10,4% of patients were damaged by the diabetes. The by product of this telemedicine was the fact that two other patologic conditions were revealed : Non exudative macular degeneration (AMD) and glaucomatic neuropathy of the optic nerve. These are also two diseases which can lead to blidness too.
Conclusions :
Telemedicine is an ideal tool to detect in early stages three eye diseases that can lead to blidness. This is a very important method to apply a true preventive medicine in populations that cannot be examined by eye doctors
This abstract was presented at the 2023 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in New Orleans, LA, April 23-27, 2023.