National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) meeting summary: Advances toward measuring diabetic retinopathy and neuropathy: from the bench to the clinic and back again (April 4-5, 2007, Baltimore, Maryland).

The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases sponsored a meeting recently to explore new ways to assess diabetic retinopathy and neuropathy, both in diabetic patients and in diabetic mice. The workshop compared current gold standards for assessment of retinopathy and neuropathy, new improvements of existing techniques, and new functional biomarkers measured with nontraditional technologies. Since the anatomical changes that comprise diabetic retinopathy and neuropathy take long to develop and have proven difficult to arrest once initiated, some talks highlighted the value of methods that are based on the pathophysiology that precedes, and might contribute to, the histopathology. In addition, a goal of the workshop was to produce a set of working criteria on phenotyping diabetic retinopathy and neuropathy that could be reviewed by the scientific community.