January is National Glaucoma Awareness Month, so we reached out to Dr. Abby Vercio, an Ophthalmologist at Prevea so we could learn more about the eye disease.
We asked her what exactly Glaucoma is, and she said “That’s a good question…Obviously we have defined it by certain criteria, but there is a lot of uncertainty still about what causes it, and what all is involved with it. It definitely is an ongoing area of research.”
She went on to explain, “There is a joke in my training and other places that would tell where if you are asking medical students difficult questions, and you asked ‘What is Glaucoma?’ and if they stared at you blankly, you would tell them they are right.” That being said, Dr. Vercio said they do know enough about it to diagnose it and to treat patients who have it.
Glaucoma is a very big deal in the optometry world because it is the second leading cause of blindness behind cataracts in the world, and “In some populations, specifically in African populations, it can be the leading cause,” Dr. Vercio explained. “It does have some genetic and geographical preferences that it likes to go after unfortunately.” But that still doesn’t answer the question of what the disease actually is.
Dr. Vercio said the best way to describe it is that “It is in the category of things that we call optic neuropathy. That’s basically a fancy word for it’s a disease of the optic nerve. The optic nerve is a cable of nervous tissue, brain tissue really, that connects the eyeball to the brain.”
The cause of Glaucoma is still hotly debated in the medical community, especially since there are other things that cause damage to the optic nerve, but Glaucoma is the most common. Another aspect of the disease is that it is bi-lateral, or attacks both eyes simultaneously. The reason most people don’t know they have it until it is too late, is because it tends to weaken our peripheral vision first, which we tend to not notice until we have tunnel vision.
“It’s like the frog in the frying pan metaphor,” she said. “if you turn the heat up little by little, the frog doesn’t realize the water is too hot until it’s too late. Unfortunately, that’s a lot about how glaucoma works too.” That is why it is very important to be tested for Glaucoma semi-regularly.
