Urinary glucose testing inaccuracies among diabetic patients. Effect of acquired color vision deficiency caused by diabetic retinopathy

G. H. Bresnick, A. Groo, M. Palta and K. Korth

The performance of two urinary glucose tests (Clinitest and Diastix) and several color vision and lightness discrimination tests was assessed in 43 diabetic patients and 43 age-matched controls. Most of the diabetics had proliferative diabetic retinopathy, with normal or mildly reduced visual acuity. The diabetics made significantly more errors on color interpretation of the urinary test results than did controls. The extent of errors for both diabetics and controls correlated with the severity of color vision deficiency but not with lightness discrimination deficiency. The diabetics' performance of the Clinitest test and, to a lesser extent, of the Diastix test was significantly better in bright light than in dimmer light. The type of color vision deficiency among most of the diabetics was characteristic of the acquired blue-yellow defect associated with diabetes mellitus. All of the color vision tests enabled identification of patients likely to make a large number of urine-testing errors with high sensitivity and fairly high specificity.