Vision Loss in Glaucoma

Symptoms, types and treatment of Glaucoma

Hi guys! I am Dr. Ravi Thadani from Ravi eye Foundation. Today we are talking about a condition called Glaucoma. Glaucoma in Hindi is known as kala motia, kala pani and some parts of India it is known as savarbai. This is one of the most common cause for irreversible vision loss in India. There are various types of Glaucomas. What is exactly Glaucoma. It is a condition in which normally the pressure of the eye is raised because of some blockage, outflow of aqueous humor which is normally produced inside the eye continuously.

There are various types of glaucoma, the most common is chronic type of glaucoma. In this chronic type of glaucoma there is gradual and slow increase in the pressure of the eye which causes a little and gradual damage. I am showing you the illustration (displays the illustration) of this condition. This is the angle of the eye where there are drainage tubes which takes out the fluid which is being produced inside the eye. There is some sort of blockage here because of one or some other reason or narrow angle so the fluid is not being drained out and thus it keeps on collecting inside the eye, this is causing increased intra-ocular pressure in the eye. This gradual increase in pressure of the eye causes continuous pressure in the nerve of the eye, which causes damage to the nerves and the retina. Because it is a slow process most of the times there are no symptoms, but few symptoms some people can notice many a times.

This is most commonly seen in people of 40 to 50 years of age and are ‘colored halos’, sometimes they may complain of chronic and frequent headaches and frequent change in the power of the glasses. There are few types of glaucoma which are not very common like Acute Glaucoma, Conginetal Glaucoma, Secondary, Traumatic. The incidence of this condition is more commonly seen in patients who have a very strong family History of Glaucoma or the patients who are diabetics. Most of the time the chronic glaucoma is detected during routine eye examination, whenever the patient comes to a eye surgeon for routine eye check up, if he is of age more than 40 years then we usually do a comprehensive eye check up in which we try to rule out any findings related to glaucoma. That’s the reason we we always recommend to all the patients to go for a routine comprehensive eye check up after 40 years of age in 1 or 1 and a half years. If this condition starts it is timely detected and treated.

There are few diagnostics tools whoch help us to detect glaucoma, like tonometry, OCT, Gonioscopy and few other tools which helps us to establish diagnosis of glaucoma. Once this condition is established, nowadays we have such a large number of medicines which helps us to control it very nicely. It was in the old days, say about 2 to 3 decades back when there were not much medicines and we used to depend upon only surgical treatments or just a few medicines which used to cause a lot of people turning into blind. But nowadays the main domain remains its early detection, timely treatment is started and if the patient continuously puts the medicine and he is contact with the eye surgeon then most of the cases they save their vision for much longer time.

If you guys have any queries or you want to consult me regarding glaucoma you can call me or you can consult me online at Lybrate.