How is Diabetic Retinopathy detected?

So that's best done with digital retinal photography. You have drops that are put in to dilate your pupils to get a good view, but they can get good retinal photographs without dilating your pupils. They take a digital retinal photograph that's sent to a diabetes screen, that's part of the National Diabetes Screening Programme, and that will be looked at and any worrying photographs are then highlighted and the patients are called in to be seen by an ophthalmologist. And then what will happen is you'll go and see the ophthalmologist and if you've been to an optician where you have that point where where you put your chin on this device and they look in the back of your eyes and they do a proper examination all the way around. Because not only with eye disease can you get that affecting the back of your eyes, you can get new vessel formation at the front of your eyes around the iris. And so they will look for that as well. They'll do a thorough examination which allows them to see in greater detail than would necessarily be the case to the digital retinal photograph.