[A multifactorial etiologic approach to diabetic dyschromatopsia. Study of 100 diabetics]

Diabetic dyschromatopsia is frequent and is a true complication of diabetes mellitus. Causative factors other than retinopathy have been suggested, but they remain unclear. We have explored the color vision of 100 diabetics aged 16 to 65 (88 insulin-dependent, 12 non-insulin dependent) with Lanthony's D15 desatured panel. Degenerative complications were looked for, especially by fundoscopy and electrophysiological exploration of peripheral nerves using specific scoring. 73% of the diabetics had dyschromatopsia. Dyschromatopsia was significatively more frequent when retinopathy was present (26 out of 30 diabetics with retinopathy versus 47/70 without). We explain the absence of a strict parallelism between dyschromatopsia and retinopathy by the intervention of other factors. Whereas the equilibration of the diabetes was not different between the groups with or without dyschromatopsia, patient age, microalbuminuria, blood pressure and alcohol intake were higher in patients with dyschromatopsia. The greater prevalence of peripheral neuropathy in patients with dyschromatopsia, confirmed by electrophysiology, and independently from the existence of retinopathy, is an indicator of the existence of neuronal disease, whose level remains to be determined. Our results are the indispensible preliminary step to a study of the respective importance of these pathogenic factors.