The prevalence of retinopathy is similar in diabetes mellitus secondary to chronic pancreatitis with or without pancreatectomy and in idiopathic diabetes mellitus.

In a retrospective study, we compared the prevalence of retinopathy in two groups of 88 diabetic patients (84 men, 4 women) with either diabetes mellitus secondary to chronic pancreatitis (CP-DM group) or idiopathic diabetes mellitus (I-DM group). The patients of these two groups were pair-matched according to age (48.7 +/- 1.1 versus 48.8 +/- 1.0 yr in CP-DM and I-DM groups, respectively; mean +/- SEM), sex, duration of diabetes (7.96 +/- 0.56 versus 8.08 +/- 0.8 yr) and therapy (80 on insulin and 8 on oral hypoglycemic agents in each group). Retinopathy was assessed by bilateral ophthalmoscopic examination of the fundus after pupillary dilation in all 176 patients and by fluorescein angiography in 47 patients with CP-DM and 35 patients with I-DM. Forty-one percent of patients in the CP-DM group and 45.5% of patients in the I-DM group had diabetic retinopathy (P greater than 0.5). In each group, patients with retinopathy were older than patients without retinopathy (51.6 +/- 1.3 versus 46.7 +/- 1.8 yr in the CP-DM group, P less than 0.01, and 52.1 +/- 1.5 versus 46.0 +/- 1.2 yr in the ID-M group, P less than 0.01). They had diabetes of longer duration (10.9 +/- 1.0 versus 5.9 +/- 0.6 yr in the CP-DM group, P less than 0.001, and 10.5 +/- 1.0 versus 6.0 +/- 0.6 yr in the ID-M group, P less than 0.001). The prevalence of retinopathy increased parallel to the duration of diabetes in a similar way in both groups.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)