RESEARCH & MORE
My powerpoint presentation and a video of my presentation can be found by clicking on this box:
Emmalyne Godfrey
Jennifer Killingsworth
Honors Mentorship
14 March 2016
Written Research Portion
What is Diabetic Retinopathy and what effects can it have on the eye? This is a question that I’ve wanted an answer to for a long time. I’ve heard about it a lot throughout my mentorship but have never fully understood it. After high-school, I am going to go to college, then hopefully a will become an eye doctor. Even though the answer to this question is only a small portion of what I will eventually be learning, I think it is important because I am interested in the subject.
I still do not know everything about diabetic retinopathy, but what I did know before conducting any research was that diabetic retinopathy stems from uncontrolled diabetes. There are different types of diabetic retinopathy and each one acts a little differently. Diabetic retinopathy is the number one cause behind blindness in America. Before researching, I knew very little about the topic, but that’s okay because they whole point of it was to answer questions that I had about the topic and make more people aware. I only had guesses and assumptions about diabetic retinopathy before I started looking into it. I assumed that there was a cure or something more doctors could do for the disease. I had no idea what causes it, how it’s detected, or how it can be treated. Finally after not knowing so much for so long, I began my search for answers.
When I started researching my essential question, I knew I was going to interview my mentor. When I went to set up a date for the interview with my mentor, he gave me two books; One is about general medicine, but has a section about eyes, and the other is about diabetic retinopathy. I looked into both of these books for information to use in my project, and was able to find a lot of helpful facts and information. My teacher gave us a site to help us find articles on the topic of our choice, so of course I got some information from those. The last source I used was the internet. I looked up some pictures, watched some videos, and read some more articles about diabetic retinopathy. All of the different research sources helped me to understand the topic and to create a presentation with a lot of the information I had found in it.
After conducting an interview and doing a lot of research, I found a lot that I didn’t know about diabetic retinopathy. It damages the blood vessels in the back of the eye, causing them to burst or break. There is a laser treatment that can fix the leakages though. The laser burns the vessels to seal the leaks. It is the number one cause of blindness in America. Diabetic retinopathy has several different diagnosis techniques, visual acuity testing, tonometry, and pupil dilation which allows the doctor to see to the back of the eye. In doing my research, I enjoyed reading about the amazing things that the eye can do and all of the things that can go wrong. Luckily, medicine today is very advanced and a lot of these problems can be fixed or treated.
Works Cited
http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/diabetic-retinopathy/basics/definition/con-20023311