January is National Glaucoma Awareness month

Dr.’s Hilliard & Tarnoff would like to remind you that January is National Glaucoma awareness month.  Glaucoma is the leading cause of preventable blindness and is known as the “sneak thief of sight” because of its insidious nature.  It is predicted that 5 million Americans have glaucoma and almost half of them don’t even know they have it!

Glaucoma occurs when the optic nerve becomes damaged.  The optic nerve is located in the back of the eye (retina) and is composed of over 1 million individual nerve cells that carry the message of vision back to the brain.  When the nerve cells continually die off over a long period of time, peripheral vision is loss first, eventually followed by central vision and ultimately, blindness!  Most patients don’t notice any loss of peripheral vision until almost 50% is already lost!  Although we don’t fully understand how glaucoma actually works, we know that having a higher than normal intra-ocular pressure (eye pressure) and/ or a lack of blood flow to the actual optic nerve is what causes the nerve cells to permanently die off. 

There are many risk factors for glaucoma.  They include: having a higher than normal intra-ocular pressure, a positive family history of glaucoma, diabetes mellitus, over the age of 50, African-American descent, eye trauma or taking steroid medications (prednisone) long-term.  The more of these risk factors one has, the greater their chances of developing glaucoma.

Although there is no cure for glaucoma, we have made great advances at diagnosing it earlier and treating it more effectively.  First of all, there are no “lifestyle changes” that one can implement to reduce their risk.  Unlike hypertension or diabetes, loosing weight, exercising and eating a healthy diet does not help treat glaucoma.  The only known treatment to slow it down or possibly halt its progression, is to lower the intra-ocular pressure (pressure inside the eye).  We can do this by prescribing eye drop medications that can reduce the production of fluid internally or increase the outflow of fluid internally.  There are also in-office laser procedures and surgical procedures that can also lower the intra-ocular pressures to safer levels.  Once patients are diagnosed with glaucoma, they should be monitored at least every 6 months and sometimes more often.  Like diabetes, glaucoma is a chronic condition that needs to be treated daily, for the rest of one’s life in order to maintain their vision as best as possible.