Risk stratification for diabetic eye screening

Excerpt

To the Editor: In the August issue of this journal Looker et al presented results from data analyses of patients from the Scottish Diabetic Retinopathy Screening programme [1]. The principal finding was that transition rates to referable diabetic eye disease were lowest among people with type 2 diabetes and who had had two consecutive screens showing no visible retinopathy. We had already published this result in Diabetes Care [2], online in November 2012 and in print in March 2013 but this has not been acknowledged by Looker et al. We recognise that our results were based on data from patients for whom we had no information on the type of diabetes, but they would predominantly have been patients with type 2 diabetes because they were from a population-based screening programme in England. The transition rates found in the Scottish study are of the same order as those found in our cohort. …