Synopsis
The National Health & Medical Research Council developed Clinical Practice Guidelines for the Management of Diabetic Retinopathy, published in 1997. This information has now been updated to include literature that has been published up to September 2007. The objective of these guidelines is to assist practitioners in making decisions about the appropriate health care of patients with diabetes.
Considerable evidence now shows that diabetes is becoming a more frequent problem in our community so that detecting diabetic eye disease is critically important, since there are well developed and proven strategies to prevent visual loss.
The period since 1997 has witnessed the introduction of newer modalities to investigate patients with diabetic eye disease, such as Optical Coherence Tomography and newer treatments such as intravitreal triamcinolone. A variety of agents aimed at inhibiting pathways leading to diabetic retinopathy (e.g. protein kinase C) or the induction of retinal angiogenesis (e.g. vascular endothelial growth factor) are also being evaluated in clinical trials at this time.
These guidelines were developed by the Australian Diabetes Society and approved by the NHMRC.
