Glaucoma is a situation that causes harm to your eye’s optic nerve and gets inferior over time. It’s regularly connected to a increase of strain inside your eye. Glaucoma tends to be inherited and may not show up until later in life.
The enlarged pressure, called intraocular pressure, can spoil the optic nerve, which transmits images to your brain. If the damage continues, glaucoma can lead to enduring vision loss. Without treatment, glaucoma can reason total enduring blindness within a few years.
Most people with glaucoma have no premature symptoms or pain. You need to see your eye doctor frequently so he/she can diagnose and treat glaucoma before long-term visual loss happens.
Causes Glaucoma?
It’s the consequence of high fluid pressure inside your eye. This happens when the liquid in the front part of the eye doesn’t flow the way it should.
Usually, the fluid, called aqueous humor, flows out of your eye through a mesh-like channel. If this channel gets blocked, the liquid builds up. That’s what causes glaucoma. The cause for the blockage is unidentified, but doctors do know it can be inborn, meaning it’s passed from parents to children.
Less general causes contain a blunt or chemical injury to your eye, severe eye infection, blocked blood vessels inside the eye, and inflammatory conditions. It’s unusual, but sometimes eye surgery to correct another situation can bring it on. It generally affects both eyes, but it may be inferior in one than the other.
Types of Glaucoma
There are two major kinds:
Open-angle glaucoma. It’s the most familiar type. Your doctor may also call it wide-angle glaucoma. The drain formation in your eye — it’s called the trabecular meshwork — looks normal, but fluid doesn’t flow out like it should.
Angle-closure glaucoma. It’s less general in the West than in Asia. You may also hear it called acute or chronic angle-closure or narrow-angle glaucoma. Your eye doesn’t drain right because the angle between your iris and cornea is too narrow. Your iris is in the way. This can cause a sudden buildup of pressure in your eye. It’s also linked to farsightedness and cataracts, a clouding of the lens inside your eye.
Symptoms of glaucoma
Chronic (primary open-angle) glaucoma is the most familiar type. It has no symptoms until eye sight is lost at a later stage.
Damage progresses very gradually and destroys vision steadily, starting with the side vision. One eye covers for the other, and the person remains ignorant of any problem until a common of nerve fibres have been damaged, and a great part of vision has been damaged. This harm is permanent. It is progressive and typically relentless. Treatment cannot get better what has been lost. But it can arrest, or at least, slow down the harm procedure. That is why it is so significant to detect the trouble as early as possible, to be able to start treatment with as miniature damage to the vision as possible.
If you have any of the following symptoms, seek immediate medical care:
- Seeing halos around lights
- Vision loss
- Redness in the eye
- Eye that looks hazy (particularly in infants)
- Nausea or vomiting
- Eye pain
- Narrowed vision (tunnel vision)
Who is at risk?
Although anyone can get glaucoma, some people have a superior risk, those with a family history of glaucoma
- diabetes
- migraine
- short sightedness (myopia)
- long sightedness (hyperopia)
- eye injuries
- blood pressure
- past or present use of cortisone drugs (steroids)
People in these groups should have their first eye check no later than the age of 35. For the majority people, it is recommended to have an eye check for glaucoma by the age of 40. If no glaucoma is found, the NHMRC (2010) Guidelines recommend regular eye health checks for Caucasians over the age of 50 & for those of African & Asian descent regular checks over the age of 40 years, because of the higher prevalence in the latter groups.
How Is Glaucoma Treated?
Your doctor may use prescription eye drops, laser surgery, or microsurgery.
Eye drops. These either decrease the structure of fluid in the eye or increase its outflow. Side effects may include allergies, redness, stinging, blurred vision, and irritated eyes. Some glaucoma drugs may influence your heart and lungs. Be sure to tell your doctor about any other medications you’re taking or are allergic to.
Laser surgery. This process can slightly enlarge the flow of the fluid from the eye for people with open-angle glaucoma. It can stop fluid blockage if you have angle-closure glaucoma. Procedures include:
- Trabeculoplasty: Opens the drainage area
- Iridotomy: Makes a tiny hole in the iris to let fluid flow more freely
- Cyclophotocoagulation: Treats areas of the middle layer of your eye to reduce fluid production.
