Glaucoma Treatment

What is Glaucoma?

When the eye’s natural draining systems and structures become interrupted or malformed from intraocular pressure, the result is Glaucoma.

Glaucoma progressively damages the nerves in your eyes which will consistently diminishes your vision until blindness. It forms due to a disruption in the natural and acceptable levels of aqueous.

Generally, it is very difficult to detect early on and is only diagnosed in its advanced stages when the majority of the damage has been done. Many factors such as steroid use, diabetes, hereditary and race increase the chance of developing Glaucoma, for instance African-american’s are up to 3 times more prone to develop the disorder.

Glaucoma Diagnosis

Since there are a lack of visible and symptoms felt from glaucoma development, the only effective way to diagnosis it are routine check ups with doctors. Some ways an optometrist can evaluate whether or not you have a developing case of glaucoma are:

• A visual field test, which measures your peripheral vision.
• Various sight tests to see the strength of your optic nerves.
• Measuring the intraocular pressure by taking ratio’s against the possible pressurized areas against the whole surface area of the eye.

Glaucoma Symptoms

Narrow Angle Glaucoma

This form of glaucoma (also known as ‘open angle glaucoma‘) increases pressure do the aqueous fluids increasing in the anterior chamber of the eye. As mentioned before, it is difficult to detect until it is too late as it does not occur on the surface of the eye, although they may appear a tad swollen.

Symptoms of narrow angle glaucoma include:

• Difficulty to focus vision, blurry from fluid pressure.
• Ability to register colors diminishes.
• Severe reddening of the eye.
• If only one eye is affected, it is often nauseating as one eye focus’s different to the other .

Open Angle Glaucoma

Around a tenth of all glaucoma cases are open angle. It is a result of the frontal drainage passages being too narrow, causing pressure as aqueous fluids pass through.

Symptoms of open angle glaucoma typically do not exist, building on it’s difficulty to treat since diagnosis often comes at too late a point. Headaches and nausea are possible, but not common for open angle.

Glaucoma Treatment

If glaucoma has managed to be diagnosed in it’s early stages, a range of options from eye drops to relieve the pressure, laser correction or even surgery can be utilized. Common medications include Bimatoprost, Timolol and Betaxolol.

Glaucoma Eye Drops:

Prescribed eye drops are available to relieve the pressure of aqueous fluid. Make sure your hands and the dropper are clean and sanitized, and the eye drops aren’t conflicting with any other sort of glaucoma medication.

Medical Marijuana:

Marijuana has yielded effective results of relieved IoP pressure for up to 4 hours. It is however, not overly more effective than other treatments and medications, making it relatively inferior due to the other long term side effects of inhaling or ingesting marijuana.

Surgery and Laser Correction:

Laser correction, which concentrates light into a powerful narrow beam to make tiny cuts and openings in the optic drainage system, may be used firsthand if the optic nerve damage is fairly limited.

If there is severe pressure and immediate risk of eyesight loss, micro surgery is necessary.

Glaucoma Drainage Implants:

Potentially incredibly expensive, the main goal of these implants are to create tiny drainage tubes to lower intraocular pressure. It is generally reserved for ‘complex’ cases of glaucoma where other means of treatment are ineffective. As with any foreign object entering the body, inflammation occurs, which may lead to more issues and even infection.

Glaucoma Pictures

The following pictures of glaucoma are taken from severe, progressed cases of the disease. The first two are of a dog and cow with severe glaucoma and fluid pressure.