Diabetes can lead to heart disease, stroke, blindness, kidney failure, nerve problems responsible for 60 percent of all amputations, a sharply reduced quality of life and sometimes death, a researcher of the disease said Saturday.

"Diabetes probably won't kill you, but everything else will," Dr. Jena Steinle said at a seminar marking World Diabetes Day at Highland Park Community Church.

The Casper Lions Club and the Diabetes Care Center at Wyoming Medical Center sponsored the event, said center coordinator Mary Tvedt.

"We want people to be screened for diabetes," Tvedt said.

Steinle, who graduated from Kelly Walsh High School in 1993, has been working on a medicine that may prevent blindness in diabetics.

But it's better to not contract the disease in the first place, she said, because diabetes is a lifelong condition.

The suffering aside, diabetes costs more than $200 billion a year; and the health care costs of a diabetes patient are 2.3 times that of a person of the same age without it, Steinle said.

It affects about 28,000 to 30,000 Wyomingites, or 7.4 percent of the state's population, Steinle said.

About 24 million Americans have the disease, and it affects about 250 million people worldwide, she said.

The worst is yet to come.

"Based on the current pace, rates of diabetes will reach pandemic levels by 2030," Steinle said.

Diabetes comes in two types, she said.

Type I, sometimes known as "juvenile diabetes," is caused by an autoimmune attack on certain cells in the pancreas.

The more common Type II is a combination of organs' resistance to insulin or an insulin deficiency, coupled with hereditary traits, physical inactivity, and obesity especially in children.

Insulin is produced by the pancreas to process sugar for cells to function correctly, she said.

For example, excess sugar damages nerves that control blood flow, Steinle said.

Damaged nerves can lead to reduced pain sensation in the hands and feet, blood doesn't flow as easily to the hands and feet, and that can lead to amputation, she said.

Excess sugar also can damage nerves and cause new blood vessels to develop in the eye, which can interfere with vision and cause blindness, Steinle said.

Those diagnosed with diabetes fear going blind more than any other complication of the disease, she said.

Steinle has been doing research at the University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center in Memphis to find a way to prevent and even reverse the effects of diabetes on eyesight.

For 10 years, she and her colleagues -- funded by a $750,000 grant from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Association -- have been developing an eye drop medication with a drug similar to that used by asthmatics, she said.

They have operated on lab rats to induce diabetes, and then apply the medication to the rats' eyes, Steinle said. "The eye drop reduces inflammation in the retina."

That keeps cells in the eyes alive and prevents the loss of the function of the retina, she said.

If the rate of progress and the funding from the National Institutes for Health continues, Steinle expects this kind of medicine could be on the market in five years after more testing, she said.

Reach Tom Morton at (307) 266-0592, or at tom.morton@trib.com.