In addition, the disease has some hereditary burden, since the descendants of people affected by glaucoma have a ten times higher risk of suffering from it. The entity indicates that the main problem is the absence of symptoms and when it shows signs, it is accompanied by loss of vision.
Prevalence of glaucoma in Spain
The current prevalence in Spain is three percent of people over 40 years of age, which means that something more than 600,000 people have glaucoma. Of these, it is estimated that the appearance of glaucoma took almost half by surprise who, if they had carried out a control for early detection, might have acted to slow down or stop the course of the disease.
The main risk factors are advanced age, family history of glaucomaelevated intraocular pressure, use of corticosteroids, ocular trauma and predisposing ophthalmological pathologies.
The only risk that can be acted upon is high intraocular pressure. “In order to stop or slow down the progression of glaucoma, it is necessary to establish a value for the intraocular pressure of each patient. This individual value is what we must try to get to stop the progression of the disease. There are different options, such as the use of eye drops, the placement of special valves, Argon laser treatment and other approaches to more complex casessuch as surgery, which will be more or less invasive depending on the patient’s situation and the degree of progress of the disease”, pointed out the glaucoma expert at Hospital Sanitas Cima, Valeria Opazo.
In relation to the glaucoma diagnosis, an in-depth study of the shape and color of the optic nerve, the complete visual field, the corneal thickness and, above all, knowing and seeing the evolution of intraocular pressure is required. For this, different technological equipment such as tonometerscampimeters, gonioscopes, calipers or optical coherence tomographers.
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