What Is Glaucoma?

Video Transcript

"Now let's talk a little bit about what is glaucoma. Glaucoma is a leading cause of blindness, here in the United States and worldwide. Often times people call it the silent thief of sight. It's a really particular problem because there's, typically, not symptoms associated with it. So, unlike a broken ankle or a problem with some other part of your body, where there's some pain or discomfort, glaucoma's one of those things where patients don't, typically, have symptoms until it's too late. Glaucoma, typically, at last measure, glaucoma effects about two million people in the Country and, typically, there's one hundred thousand new cases of glaucoma diagnosed each year. Glaucoma is, typically, is more prevalent in African Americans and it is essentially caused by an increase of pressure within the eye. If we go back to how our eye works, inside the eye here there's a fluid and there's two types of fluid. There's fluid that's here on the front of the iris, right behind the cornea, there's another style of fluid back here in the back. It's this front fluid that we're talking about, in this front cavity, it's called aqueous. Glaucoma's a problem where there is either too much production of this aqueous or there's some problem with its outflow and so as a result, this fluid is being produced in here and there's a lower amount of that fluid leaving so as a result, there's an increase in pressure in the eye. As that pressure increases, it causes this compressive damage against the nerve back here, causing the nerve to become damaged. And when the nerve becomes damaged, what we find, is that patients start loosing some peripheral vision. Earlier I mentioned that glaucoma doesn't have symptoms and so, typically, when patients come in we won't find them to say "look, I'm having a hard time with my peripheral vision." There's a lot of studies that suggest that about forty percent of peripheral vision is lost before there's a subjective complaint, before people will complain that there is some loss of eyesight."