What is "glaucoma"?

What is "glaucoma"?

Robert K. Maloney (Ophthalmologist) gives expert video advice on: What treatments are available to me if I have glaucoma?; Can glaucoma be prevented? and more...

Glaucoma means that you have too much pressure in your eye, and that this pressure is damaging your eye's nerve. Your eye is actually soft, and is almost like a leather ball. What keeps it firms is it's inflated with fluid (with pressure). If there's too much pressure, you will then get glaucoma, and that can damage the nerve of your eye. Glaucoma is a particularly scary disease because there's usually no symptoms to cure Glaucoma. It is also called "the thief in the night" because it steals your vision away gradually from the perifory towards the center, which means you tend not to notice it until very late. That's why it's so important to have regular eye check-ups, particularly as you get older, because it's only through regular eye check-up that glaucoma gets detected in most people.