With an ever increasing prevalence of type II diabetes, diabetic maculopathy will continue to pose a large problem for ophthalmologists. Laser photocoagulation is often disappointing both for the patient and the doctor, and there seems to have been little in the way of progress for some years now.

Whitelocke and colleagues’ paper1 classified maculopathy into focal, exudative, and ischaemic types and they highlighted their different prognoses. Although treatment of focal maculopathy is reasonable, the scope for improving vision in established exudative and ischaemic maculopathy is very limited and despite treatment this group of patients must account for a large percentage of the blind and partially sighted registrations attributed to diabetes, especially in the over 65 age group. …