Look deep into her eyes - and detect diabetes
WASHINGTON: Look deep into someone's eyes and know what is in their hearts - or whether they will eventually get diabetes!
Yes, a new screening device that pinpoints early symptoms of impending eye disease also helps doctors detect patients prone to diabetes.
The instrument, designed by scientists at the University of Michigan Kellogg Eye Centre, captures eye images to detect metabolic stress and tissue damage.
The non-invasive device takes five minutes to test both eyes. For diabetics, diagnosed or not, it potentially offers advantages over blood glucose testing, the "gold standard" for diabetes detection.
The device measures the intensity of cellular fluorescence in retinal tissue. A high level of such fluorescence -- or flavoprotein autofluorescence (FA) -- is a reliable indicator of eye disease.
Victor M. Elner and Howard R. Petty, authors of the study, then measured the FA levels of 21 individuals who had diabetes and compared the results to age-matched healthy controls.
The scientists found that FA activity was significantly higher for those with diabetes, regardless of severity, compared to those who did not have the disease.
Petty, a biophysicist and imaging expert, explained that hyperglycemia - or high blood sugar - is known to induce cell death in diabetic tissue soon after the onset of disease but before symptoms can be detected clinically.
Petty also observed that unlike glucose monitoring, elevation of FA levels reflects ongoing tissue damage.
The findings of the study have appeared in the latest issue of the journal Archives of Ophthalmology

Ayurvedic Organic Jeans: Custom Clothing Company Makes Garments That Possess Medicinal Benefits

MUMBAI, India, July 8 -- Make Your Own Jeans (www।MakeYourOwnJeans।com), a company with global presence, specializes in making customized jeans to meet personal needs। They have recently created a new fashion product using techniques that go back over 5,000 years and are said to heal the body.This new organic jeans product uses a process that originated in India; it's called Ayurveda. Fabrics are dyed in medicinal herbs as a means of practicing Ayurvedic medicine to treat various illnesses. Ayurveda-treated fabrics expose these medicinal herbs to the body through the skin - the body's largest organ. Depending on which herbs are used in the dyes, Ayurveda-treated fabric may treat a broad range of medical conditions including skin ailments, diabetes, arthritis, digestive problems, high blood pressure and more. Each dye may contain up to 50 different herbs. MakeYourOwnJeans.com has received an Organic Certificate for their chemical free, Indian-origin fabrics from the Netherlands; the natural hand process dyeing is performed in the forests of India. Even the building where the fabrics are dyed is comprised of organic bricks.