Glaucoma is an optical disease or basically an abnormality occurrence in the eye. Pathologically, it is characterized by the loss of certain cells in the eye resulting to visual field loss at a certain level. In highly technical terms, there is abnormally high intraocular pressure. This is sometimes referred to as intraocular hypertension. A normal intraocular pressure reaches up to 21mm Hg only.
Glaucoma is actually caused by – in layman’s terms – too much humidity in the eyes. There is not too much fluid in the eye to compensate for its intraocular pressure.
You can actually detect glaucoma yourself if you lose some of your peripheral vision. However, early vision loss is subtle especially for the subject. He or she may not notice that glaucoma is coming in his eyesight precisely because it only involves minimal loss of one’s peripheral vision. And one does not use peripheral vision that often, people always use direct line of sight. Be warned though because if left untreated, glaucoma will cause total blindness because cells lost at the sides of the eyes will slowly progress to the center and your direct line of sight will surely be affected.
Another symptom in persons affected with glaucoma is having tunnel vision. Persons high on hallucinogens may experience tunnel vision but this is a different story. There are other incredibly unexplainable symptoms of glaucoma like abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting.
Persons who may be highly possible in contracting glaucoma in the future are those who are already afflicted with hypertension. There is also a high possibility for a person to have glaucoma if either one of his or her parents has it. In extremely rare cases, infants are affected with glaucoma. But congenital glaucoma can be detected easily because you can see cloudiness in the cornea and you cannot glare and stare at heavily-lighted places.
From an ethnical point of view, minorities such as Asians and Inuits are prone to glaucoma than Checking for glaucoma is done through your typical eye examination although advanced forms are also available through laser eye checkup. Some of these I’ll discuss here. One of them is the air puff test. Your ophthalmologist will point an object directly to your eye. The object releases a stream of air. Your ophthalmologist will then observe how fast your eye reflexively reacts from the air puffed from the object.
There are quite a number of processes in treating glaucoma, foremost of which are certain drugs. Then there’s surgery too. Prostaglandin analogs, miotic agents, beta-blockers, sympathomimetics and alpha-adrenergic agonists will help treat glaucoma. Interestingly, marijuana has also been found positive as a treatment for glaucoma and medical enthusiasts all over the world are either doing research or lobbying for marijuana as an ingredient injected to certain drugs used for glaucoma treatment. Why? Because marijuana has also been found out to decrease the wetness in the eyes. As of the moment, researchers are also trying to formulate a drug which reduces glutamate buildup to treat glaucoma. Glutamate is essential for calcium travel; therefore, calcium cannot enter the eye’s nerve cell which is toxic.
There are two types of surgery to treat glaucoma. There is laser surgery and there is the conventional surgery.
Helpful link about Glaucoma:
