Glaucoma
What is "glaucoma"?
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.
Who is at increased risk for glaucoma?
There are certain people who are at increased risk for glaucoma. If you have a family history of glaucoma you're an increased risk. If you're a dark skinned individual: black, native American, Hispanic, you're an increased risk for glaucoma. Those people should definitely be getting annual eye checkups and often at an age younger than 4.
What are the most common symptoms of glaucoma?
There's a rare kind of glaucoma called acute glaucoma, which comes on suddenly and you do know you have it because you get a red, painful, tender eye and a lot of light sensitivity, and your vision gets very blurry. If you develop those symptoms, and achy pain , get yourself to an eye doctor fast.
What treatments are available to me if I have glaucoma?
The basic treatment for glaucoma is lowering the pressure in the eye so that it stops damaging the eye nerve. There are a number of ways to do that. It can be done with eyedrops that lower eye pressure, with laser treatment that essentially creates little holes to let some of the pressure leak out of the eye, or with a surgery where the doctor actually makes a hole from the inside of the eye to the outside to let that pressure off. With the proper treatment, glaucoma can almost always be controlled and blindness prevented.
Can glaucoma be prevented?
There's no way to prevent glaucoma and there's no way to reverse the damage of glaucoma once it happens. The thing about glaucoma is catching it when it starts and then treating it so it doesn't get any worse. The only way to do that is in partnership with your eye doctor.
