Type 2 Diabetes is a leading cause of blindness in working-aged Americans. Vision loss comes from diabetic
eye disease which includes diabetic retinopathy and edema. Diabetic eye disease can appear at any retinal
location and damages both the inner and outer retina. There are no treatments outside of glycemic control for
early diabetic eye disease. Methods for early diagnosis and detection, especially if location-specific, are
important as they can help doctors and patients to be proactive in delaying retinopathy and vision loss. Current
clinical tests such as multifocal electroretinograms (mfERG), ocular coherence tomography (OCT), and color
vision assessment have been widely shown to be altered in early diabetes. However, there has been little work
to characterize localized color vision deficiencies across the diabetic retina, and it remains unclear exactly
which cells are implicated in color vision losses. To address these gaps, the proposed research will test
patients using a custom chromatic microperimeter to precisely quantify color discrimination across the visual
field. In Aim 1, color thresholds from patients with diabetes and prediabetes will be shown to differ from
normally sighted control subjects, with the degree of impairment and variation in testing correlated with HbA1c
levels. In addition to expected reductions in the blue-yellow pathway, it is hypothesized that the red-green
pathway will show a deficiency as well, addressing the controversy concerning whether S-cone loss alone
underlies the color vision deficits in diabetes. In Aim 2, additional co-registered structural and functional
measures from mfERG, OCT, and fundus photography will reveal that spatially localized losses are associated
with regions of damage, laying the foundation for future longitudinal studies aimed at the early detection of
affected regions in diabetes and prediabetes. The ability to predict which areas are most affected could
constitute a significant advance in diagnosis and management of this disease and potentially create new end
points for future studies and trials. Diabetes has reached epidemic proportions in the US and worldwide and
better understanding the effects of the disease could lead to improvements in the lives of these patients.