Regular screenings protect against glaucoma

At first you don’t notice a thing. And why should you? Your eyesight seems perfect.
But what you don’t know is that the pressure of fluid inside your eyeballs has increased, and is causing damage to your optic nerve.
Still, you don’t feel a thing, and your vision isn’t affected, so you go about your day-to-day activities, unaware of the danger that lies ahead.
When you finally do realize something is wrong — you’ve lost a good deal of your peripheral vision, and are on your way to developing tunnel vision — it’s too late to save the sight that’s gone.
Such is the sinister nature of glaucoma, a disease that affects more than 2.2 million Americans over the age of 40, according to the National Institutes of Health.
“The early stages of glaucoma have absolutely no symptoms,” said Dr. Mildred M.G. Olivier, president and CEO of the Midwest Glaucoma Center in Hoffman Estates, Ill., and a board member of Prevent Blindness America. “That’s why we call it ‘the silent thief of sight.’ By the time someone feels like something is wrong with their vision, their glaucoma already is very advanced.”
Glaucoma is the common name of a group of diseases that cause damage to the optic nerve, causing blind spots in the victim’s visual field. These blind spots usually start in the peripheral vision, but can spread and eventually cause complete blindness in one or both eyes.
“Most people wrongly think of glaucoma as only a disease of high eye pressure,” said Dr. Kuldev Singh, a professor of ophthalmology at Stanford University. “It’s really the most common optic nerve disease in the world.”
Since the disease has no early symptoms, regular screening is the only way to detect and prevent it.
Olivier recommends that people have their ophthalmologist perform a dilated eye examination, so the doctor can take a direct look at the optic nerve and review it for damage.
Other tests include tonometry, in which an instrument measures pressure inside the eye, and pachymetry, in which the doctor uses ultrasonic waves to measure the thickness of your cornea.—Online