• Posted December 17, 2025

Texture Scan Of Retina Might Reveal Silent Vision Loss Among Diabetics

Eye scans could soon be able to predict if a person with diabetes is at risk of losing their vision, thanks to results of a new lab rat study.

Early changes in the texture of the retina appear to be related to the onset of diabetic retinopathy, researchers recently reported in the journal Eye and Vision.

“Our results demonstrate that texture analysis can uncover minute retinal changes long before diabetic retinopathy becomes clinically visible,” co-senior author António Francisco Ambrósio, a professor at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, said in a news release.

Diabetic retinopathy occurs when high blood sugar levels damage the blood vessels in the retina — the layer of cells along the back wall of the eye that sense light and send visual signals to the brain, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO).

As the damaged blood vessels swell, leak or close, they damage the cells of the retina, causing patients to gradually lose vision, the AAO says.

Unfortunately, most people with diabetic retinopathy are diagnosed only after years of unrecognized retinal damage and vision loss, researchers noted.

That’s because early changes associated with diabetic retinopathy — nerve degeneration, inflammation and blood vessel dysfunction — aren’t detectable through the standard scans used by eye doctors, researchers said.

For this study, researchers tested the ability of a type of scan called optical coherence tomography (OCT) to capture early retinal changes in the eyes of lab rats with type 2 diabetes.

OCT uses reflected light to create cross-sectional pictures of the back of the eye. It’s typically used to assess the structure and thickness of the retina, but previous research has shown that the scan can convey more in-depth information about eye health, researchers said.

In all, researchers evaluated more than 80 retinal scans taken from both healthy rats and those with type 2 diabetes.

Results showed that the retinas of diabetic rats underwent a series of significant and specific changes in texture.

Further, these changes occurred in retinas that had not developed any inflammation or blood vessel leaking, showing their potential as an early warning flag for diabetic retinopathy, researchers said.

“By capturing subtle structural signals within OCT images, this approach opens a new diagnostic window into the earliest disease processes,” Ambrósio said. “It offers a way to identify high-risk patients before permanent vision damage occurs, supporting earlier treatment and better outcomes. The coherence of these texture metrics across diabetes models strengthens their potential as universal early biomarkers.”

These results pave the way for developing AI-assisted tools that could look for impending diabetic retinopathy based on the retinal texture found in OCT scans, researchers said.

However, further study is needed to validate these findings in human beings, researchers noted.

More information

The American Academy of Ophthalmology has more on diabetic retinopathy.

SOURCE: Chinese Academy of Sciences, news release, Nov. 27, 2025