World Sight Day is marked each year to raise awareness about avoidable blindness and the importance of regular eye examinations, and doctors at Vision Eye Centre say diabetic retinopathy is one of the clearest examples of why that message matters. The condition, a leading cause of preventable blindness, is becoming more common across India, and the biggest reason, they say, is simple: most patients are not getting screened early enough, or at all.
Diabetic retinopathy occurs when consistently high blood sugar damages the tiny blood vessels in the retina, the part of the eye responsible for vision. Left unchecked, it can lead to permanent vision loss. Yet unlike many eye conditions, it often develops silently, with no early symptoms, which is exactly what makes regular screening so important, and exactly the kind of avoidable vision loss World Sight Day aims to spotlight.
“About 15 to 20 per cent of our diabetic patients show signs of retinopathy at their very first screening,” said Dr. Apoorv Grover, Consultant, Vitreo-Retina and Uvea at Vision Eye Centre.
“We are seeing more and more patients with this condition. Those who are aware of their diabetes and get regular eye checks usually present with early or no disease at all. But a large number of patients come to us only after the disease has progressed, often because they were diagnosed with diabetes late or knew about it but never took it seriously,” he added.
According to Dr. Grover, three patterns show up repeatedly in the clinic. Some patients are diagnosed with diabetes only after they have already developed retinopathy, meaning their blood sugar had likely been elevated, unchecked, for years before diagnosis. Others know they have diabetes but do not manage it properly, leaving their blood sugar high for extended periods without realising the damage it is doing to their eyes. And a third group simply never considers an eye check-up necessary, even after years of high blood sugar, until vision loss has already set in and the disease has reached an advanced, harder to treat stage.
What the national data shows
The scale of the problem is backed by national research published in PMC, National Center for Biotechnology Information. The study conducted between 2015 and 2019 found that 11.8 per cent of India’s population lives with diabetes, and notably, one in three of those cases was newly diagnosed at the time of the survey itself, meaning the person had been living with undetected diabetes until then. Among people already diagnosed with diabetes, the same study found that 16.9 per cent had some degree of diabetic retinopathy, and 3.6 per cent had a sight-threatening form of the disease. The two biggest risk factors identified were how long a person has had diabetes and how well their blood sugar has been controlled over that time.
The picture looks even more concerning closer to home. A sub-analysis of the ICMR-INDIAB study focused on Haryana found that diabetes was significantly more common in urban areas, at 17.9 per cent, compared to 9.5 per cent in rural areas, pointing to a particularly high burden in cities across the Delhi NCR region. A separate study in Delhi found combined rates of diabetes, prediabetes, and obesity exceeding 18 per cent and called for urgent preventive action to curb the disease and its complications, including vision loss.
Why awareness, not just treatment, is the real gap
Doctors at Vision Eye Centre stress that the technology and treatments to manage diabetic retinopathy already exist and work well when patients arrive in time. Laser therapy and injection-based treatments can preserve and often improve vision when the disease is caught early. The real gap, they say, is that too many people only think about their eyes after their vision has already started to fail, by which point treatment becomes more complex and outcomes are harder to guarantee.
Vision Eye Centre is urging anyone living with diabetes, regardless of how long they have had it or how well controlled they believe it is, to get a dilated retina examination at least once a year, and sooner if they notice any change in vision. For those recently diagnosed with diabetes, doctors recommend an eye check-up as soon as possible, since the survey data suggests a meaningful number of patients already have some retinal changes at the time diabetes itself is first detected.
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