A higher risk of sight loss in African-Caribbean diabetics

The number of health conditions experienced by people living in Britain covers a wide spectrum because more diseases have come ashore as other nations have made the UK their home.

- DR MIRIAM STOPPARD

Now it's our responsibility to see if there's a variation in the form diseases take in different groups.

For instance, African-Caribbean people with type 1 diabetes are at a greater risk of developing sight-threatening diabetic retinopathy, which if untreated, can lead to blindness.

So we should be grateful to researchers from King's College London for revealing the relationship between ethnicity and type 1 diabetes-related eye disease.

Diabetic retinopathy is caused by high blood sugar levels damaging the retina at the back of the eye, and it's the leading cause of blindness in working age people in the UK and many other countries.