December 9, 2014 – Easy Access

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Anchor lead:  Taking pictures of the eye at the pharmacy may help people with diabetes avoid vision loss, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Vision loss is common in people with diabetes, in part because people aren’t aware it’s happening until significant loss has occurred. Now a new technique that simply takes a picture of the back of the eye, available at pharmacies, and transmits the photograph to an expert to be assessed, can help.  Neil Bressler, an ophthalmologist at Johns Hopkins, comments.

Bressler: The wonderful thing is we may now be able to identify people who were not coming to eye care specialists to realize that they had some damage may have a fairly simple way to pick this up, when they go to a pharmacist, when they get this image and it gets processed.  So this shows us it’s a viable way of reducing the vision loss that might otherwise occur in these people.   :24

Bressler is delighted to see such practical utilization of available technologies.

Bressler: We need simple, convenient ways to get people into the system who have this damage.  :06

At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.