Preventing Glaucoma associated Blindness

Glaucoma affects more than 70 million people around the world, making it the leading cause of irreversible blindness.  Primary care physicians can play an important role in detecting glaucoma, which can often go undiagnosed until it becomes severe.  A new review of the medical literature provides an overview of the causes and treatments for the disease. “We recognize that there are individuals who are at highest risk for glaucoma and these individuals can be recognized and detected by primary care providers and referred for more definitive examinations.” Dr. Robert Weinreb and co-authors examined more than a decade of medical literature on how to detect and treat open angle and closed angle glaucoma.  “We single out those individuals who have high eye pressure, intraocular pressure, individuals who have a family history of glaucoma and then there are certain ethnicities that are also at highest risk for glaucoma, particularly those of African ancestry and also Latino ancestry.”  The study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.