Good news for glaucoma patients

As the population in the United States continues to age more and more people are at risk from losing their sight.  One of the leading causes of blindness in this country is glaucoma which affects up to 2% of the population over the age of 40 with certain ethnic groups such as Blacks having a greater risk for blindness.  Other leading for blindness are cataracts, diabetic retinopathy, and macular degeneration.  Luckily cataract surgery leads to full visual recovery but that is not true for the other disease entities.

With glaucoma better understanding of the disease as well as better diagnostic tools have lead to earlier detection of this disease which is important since vision lost cannot be recovered.  One of the important advances is the recognition that people with normal eye pressures can still have glaucoma and those with relatively high pressures may never suffer from this disease.  An excellent diagnostic tool to help predict vision loss is the newly developed OCT or ocular computerized tomogram.  This tool can analyze the health of the nerve fiber layer which is always compromised with glaucoma.

Treatment modalities have also improved.  Newer glaucoma medications are able to treat people more effectively while at the same time requiring less frequent dosaging which also leads to less side effects.  Laser treatments have improved with the devopment of selective laser trabeculectomy which can reduce and sometimes eliminate the need for medication.  Newer surgical approaches are also being developed when the above modalities fail in very advanced cases.  These newer surgical techniques are safer and less invasive and involve using shunts in place of the gold standard trabeculectomy technique.