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Special Goznuru Eye Hospital, Gaziantep/TURKEY There are 347 million people having Diabetes Mellitus (DM) in the world. This number is expected to double by 2030. DM epidemic will result diabetic retinopathy (DR) epidemic. Prevalence of DR is ~%30 and sight threatening DR is ~ %10 in DM patients. Annual DR screening, decreased the blindness four-fold. As the prevalence of DM worldwide is rising and the total cost of screening, it becomes more important to make screening programs as effective as possible. The duration for the development of vision threatening DR is different for each patient. Only 3% of the annually screened patient need treatment, 97 of the 100 patient only increased the costs of screening. For that reason, individual risk assessment must be done and patients having higher risk must be screened more frequently than the patients having lower risk. The individual risk assessment for sight threatening DR for the 1st, 5th, 10th year and screening interval can be calculated with the aid of following 6 risk factors, duration, type of DM, glycemic control, systemic blood pressure, gender and grade of DR, that makes up 80% of all the risk factor effects via using the site www.risk.is. In the Danish diabetes database, this algorithm recommends screening intervals ranging from 6 to 60 months with a mean of 29 months. This is 59% fewer visits than fixed annual screening. In order to combat with DM epidemic and its complications we need all help we can get. Working in teams and engaging primary care is essential. Keywords : Diabetes mellitus, diabetic retinopathy, epidemiology, epidemic, eye diseases, screening programs