BDNF and diabetes mellitus: While LC3 upregulation in diabetic retina and its association with BDNF deficiency was in line with previous preclinical studies [7,38,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51], it is the first time that increased ATG14 levels have been reported to be associated with diabetes-induced retinal damage, although the upregulation of other ATG-related proteins has been widely demonstrated in DR models [44,45,51,52,53].