“…To our knowledge, only one study with a cross-sectional design has assessed the relationship between QoL and the presence of DR in patients with type 1 diabetes using a diabetes-specific QoL questionnaire [15]. So far, all of the published scientific evidence regarding this issue used generic instruments or visual function scales to appraise the impact of DR in the QoL of patients with type 1 diabetes [16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30]. The FinnDiane study, which included a large sample of patients with type 1 diabetes, did not find any association between the presence of DR and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) using a generic instrument [16]; it should be pointed out that, in this study, DR was determined to be present if the subject had ever received treatment for DR and that 53% of the patients had also diabetic nephropathy, which could influence the results.…”