"Insulin causes blindness"

I agree just looking diet is everything . I learned it to late but we need to educate the young people to eat
heathy and get ex. pollution and modern stress is also a problem.

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Now these repair effords can induce the uncontrolled growth of new blood vessels in the retina.

That is news to me. Can you provide a link? What I have learned is that as a compensatory mechanism, the eye will start to grow new vessels, without treatment. These vessels are very delicate and can easily break/rupture, leading to bleeding, leading to scar tissue formation, leading to retinal detachment.

The patients I see all live in a developed society and have access to regular podiatrists and ophthalmologists.

nats 1, welcome to the gang! Yup, some people are smarter, but we all have an issue with diabetes, whether it’s 1 or 2 or LADA or MODY or just too damn sweet for our own good! The one thing we all try to do is learn more about ourselves and what “diabetes” means to each of us personally. We watch what we eat and drink, we test our sugars as often as necessary and record it so we can show our doctors how some foods make our sugars go whacky (like potatoes) and some seem to keep us steady (like proteins and green veggies). Mostly we take it a day at a time. I’ve done pills, dieted, used insulin off and on and now am doing the best ever with an insulin pump, low doses of insulin and a low carbohydrate diet. That’s what I do now–it might change some day as I learn more. Good luck!

Sorry for my late reply. My eye doc told me about one patient with rapid growth of new blood vessels. I think the mechanism is that high glucose numbers induced by the lack of insulin will reduce the presence of specific growth factors. By rapidly improving the glucose levels with sufficient insulin these growth factors will be released in higher volumes again. These might induce the uncontrolled growth of new blood vessels to overcome the micro-damages induced to the retina by longer periods with high glucose numbers.

Thank you Holger. This is an interesting discussion and I am learning just enough to have my brain fried! It seems there is more to the story than I originally thought. Might you by chance have the source of that information?

I have been keeping tabs on this topic for a couple of weeks now, researching here and there, and what I’ve found is that hyperglycemia affects growth factors. The pathogenesis of diabetic retinopathy: old concepts and new questions - PubMed
The pathogenesis of diabetic retinopathy: old concepts and new questions

But I have also found testimonials here and there (including from a friend at work) that going low makes people with diabetes, often, lose vision, even if temporarily.

For hyper: When blood glucose levels go up, blood gets thicker. [That’s one mechanism, apparently. But there are others]

For hypo: “Diabetes can also cause blurriness or double vision due to hypoglycemia (low blood glucose). In this case, lens shape is probably not to blame. Low blood glucose can make it hard for the brain to focus on what the eye is seeing. Vision usually returns to normal when glucose levels rise.”

And this

http://www.diabeticconnect.com/diabetes-discussions/general/657-temporary-vision-loss

“Last night was the 3rd or 4th time I’ve experienced temporary vision loss, sometimes it is only my peripheral vision and lasts no longer than 5-10 minutes. My heart was racing, I broke out into a sweat and felt like I was gonna pass out, I couldn’t see to check my blood sugar so I just took some insta glucose. My vision came back but I was really tired. This happened about 10 minutes after taking a shot of insulin. My blood sugar in the am was 93, that is the only time i check. In the past when this happened my blood pressure was 140-160/80, didn’t know where my bp machine was to check it. Anyone else experience anything like this? All my family are diabetics, most are insulin dependent, also my father went blind in his 40s because he didn’t take care of his, and died at 45. So this really concerns me, am gonna call my doctor soon as the office opens but just curious if anyone has any insight.”

This type of reaction is quite a bit different than “insulin makes you go blind.”

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One visual hypoglycemia symptom I’ve experienced, I call the “flash bulb” effect. I see several small round areas that block out small areas of vision much like the after effect of flash photography or a strobe light. This is, for me, a sure-fire way to know that I’m hypo when I wake up in the middle of the night before I test. This symptom is 100% correct in indicating that I’m hypo. I’ve read about others who report the same thing.

When bicycling under trees on a sunny day, the flashing effect of quickly moving through a field of shady and sunny spots irritates me.

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Sadly I do not have much to back the comments of my eye doc up with scientific research. I remember that the eye is sensitive to changes in concentration of the blood glucose. If the blood glucose is rapidly changing this will increase the diffusion pressure through the retina. The retina is the only way the eye can exchange fluids with the blood stream. If for example the blood glucose is high and the concentration in the eye is lower then this difference will initiate diffusion processes. I am just not sure in which direction but usually water will diffuse from the place of lower concentration to the place of higher concentration if I remember this correctly. In this example water would then diffuse from the eye to the blood stream. A patient with high numbers would have a high glucose concentration in his eyes. If his blood glucose is normalizing this would induce diffusion of water into his eye. This might rapidly increase the pressure in the eyes and as a result the retina might suffer damages. Again highly speculative on my side. But perhaps the diffusion pressure or gradient (the difference) plays an important role in possible damages to the retina by diffusion. These damages might then be repaired by new blood vessels. If this is getting out of control…

I know these “flash bulbs” too. It is like being blinded by the sun. If I am very low (below 40) at night I will see a small ring in my vision, I call it the “ring of death” :wink:

Something much worse than the blindness some patients fear from taking insulin is the fact that severe hypoglycemia caused by insulin treatment can sometimes cause death! To the extent that death is a risk of taking insulin, those patients are right to be scared.

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Terry, I am familiar with that “flash bulb” effect when my bg’s are low too.

To me, it’s not so much my eyes that aren’t working. It seems more like, the information from that part of the eye has gone missing inside my brain, and the more I try to see the missing information the more I realize that it’s missing. It’s bizarre.

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I think you’re right, @Tim12. Eyesight is a combination of the visual signal produced by the eye and the brain’s decoding of that signal. Since the brain is a large consumer of the body’s glucose, hypoglycemia’s effect on the brain is significant.

Luckily for me, with better glucose control over the last several years, I rarely see those “flashbulb effects” any more. It used to happen to me several times per month.