Cornea and its changes in diabetes mellitus: the review

Abstract

Diabetes mellitus (DM) is the most common endocrine disease, which makes it a priority among health and social problems. Ocular manifestations in diabetes often lead to patient disability. This review presents an analysis of morphological, experimental and clinical studies of the cornea in patients with diabetes mellitus, including original research, reviews and monographs of Russian and foreign authors from recent years. In addition, modern methods of corneal disease diagnosis are reviewed. Clinical and morphological changes in the diabetic cornea are discussed and early diabetic changes in all structural layers are indicated. The importance of changes to nerve fibres in diabetes is discussed and the correlation between the density of nerve fibres in the cornea and the density of epidermal nerve fibres is shown.

Keywords

• diabetes
• corneal confocal microscopy
• keratopathy
• endothelial dysfunction
• corneal neuropathy
• polyneuropathy