Glaucoma

Glaucoma occurs when you have pressure of fluids within the eye that is higher than it should be. It’s similar to high blood pressure in the eye. High intraocular pressure can destroy your eye’s delicate arteries, veins, and nerve fibers. If your intraocular pressure builds up, the optic nerve at the back of your eye may atrophy, causing vision to become incomplete, fuzzy or dim. If you leave this untreated, matters can reach the point where progressive loss of peripheral vision can occur. Glaucoma is also known to lead to blindness.

If you have glaucoma, you have a serious problem because you depend on your peripheral vision for many things. Driving is something you have to have your peripheral vision in order to do. If you don’t have your peripheral vision, operating a vehicle becomes very dangerous. There are a large number of accidents that happen each year because someone has glaucoma and can’t see peripherally.

Glaucoma Surgery

Certain people can have higher intraocular pressure on multiple checkups but don’t have glaucoma. These patients are followed closely and are diagnosed as glaucoma suspect or as ocular hypertensives. True glaucoma is usually something that’s inherited. Diabetes can also cause glaucoma, because of its effects on the veins and arteries. And if you ever have blunt trauma to the head, you can rupture or tear a filtering angle in your eye, and that may develop into traumatic glaucoma.

If you treat glaucoma early enough, you can keep further damage to your eyes from happening. A glaucoma treatment plan must be vigorously adhered to once it’s started. There are plenty of stories about patients who stopped using their glaucoma medications and stopped returning to the doctors for their glaucoma checkups visits. Some of the patients turned blind in the process and couldn’t get their sight back.

Glaucoma Treatment

The medications for glaucoma are usually short-acting eyedrops that need to be applied two to four times daily. It’s recommended that patients allow at least five minutes between the application of different eyedrops. The eye can only hold a maximum of two eyedrops, and the second eyedrop will likely was the first one out of the eye. Also pilocarpines are drugs that safe to use for the treatment of glaucoma and are being used less frequently because these drugs metabolize in six hours. So these drugs must be used four times a day to have a positive effect.