What are the Symptoms of Glaucoma?

How can I be sure I am safe?

The symptoms of Glaucoma in Acute Angle-Closure Glaucoma are the sudden onset of pain, blurred vision, coloured halos around lights, and frontal headache with nausea and vomiting.

This sudden type of glaucoma needs immediate treatment as irreversible damage occurs to the optic nerve within hours, resulting in vision loss. The treatment is aimed at lowering the abnormally high pressure within the eye.

If you experience these symptoms of glaucoma, you need to go to your closest eye doctor or hospital eye clinic as soon as possible. This is an emergency.

This form of glaucoma is more common in Asians, Eskimos and hyperopes - due to certain physical traits within these eyes that make it easier for the eye's drainage system to get blocked.

It can also run in families. If you have had an Angle-Closure attack, you should alert family members of their risk of it happening to them also. The risk can be as high as 30-50%.

Primary Open Angle Glaucoma

Thankfully, most people with glaucoma have Primary Open Angle Glaucoma. This is a much slower form of glaucoma. However, the symptoms of glaucoma in this type are rarely noticed until considerable damage has been done to the eye's optic nerve. Indeed, people diagnosed with Open Angle Glaucoma have often not noticed anything wrong with their vision at the time of diagnosis, even though they may have lost a lot of vision already.

The symptoms of glaucoma that some people start to notice are:

• Vague feeling that your vision is not as good as it was
• Losing your place when reading
• Poorer night vision
• Clumsiness, bumping into things, tripping over things you didn't see

It is estimated that around 2% of Australians have glaucoma (ie 300,000 people). Half of them do not know it. Glaucoma symptoms are not early warning signs, they appear after you have had the condition for some time, so regular eye examinations are important. Your Optometrist can detect the signs of Glaucoma long before you experience any symptoms. With treatment, you can prevent losing your vision.

The exact causes of glaucoma are still not known. What we do know is that you are at increased risk of this disease if

• A family member has it already
• You have raised eye pressure
• Your eyes have particular physical features
• You have Diabetes
• You get Migraines
• You have high or low blood pressure
• You are quite short-sighted

The mainstay of treatment is to lower and control your eye pressure by using medicated eye drops everyday. This reduces the likelihood of the disease progressing. For most people, this is all that needs to be done to prevent further vision loss. Unfortunately, neural tissue does not grow back. So it is important to detect and treat it at its early stages, before noticing symptoms of glaucoma.

Proper diagnosis and ongoing treatment can help slow or stop vision loss. If it is left undiagnosed and untreated, you can lose all of your vision.

Glaucoma is a family of optic nerve diseases. There are a few different types, as you will see below, but what they have in common is their effect on your vision. The way the optic nerve is affected results in you losing your side vision first - usually in the mid periphery of your vision. This means that there is good vision on either side of the areas of poor vision.

Your brain will cleverly "fill in the gaps" and you will not notice that these areas don't see as well. You lose quite a bit of neural tissue before you can sense anything.

Types of Glaucoma

• Acute Angle Closure Glaucoma
• Primary Open Angle Glaucoma
• Low Pressure Glaucoma
• Pigmentary Glaucoma
• Pseudoexfoliative Glaucoma
• Secondary Glaucoma

What causes eye pressure?

The eyeball is kept inflated with a fluid called Aqueous Humour. Special cells filter your blood and secrete the Aqueous, which is full of the nutrients that the eye needs. The fluid then drains out of the eye again through a drain at the far edge of the iris. We need a normal amount of pressure from this fluid to keep the eye inflated.

When the pressure gets too high, it is believed that this is part of what causes damage to the optic nerve. To confuse the matter, a lot of diagnosed sufferers had normal pressure even before treatment. Needless to say, the researchers are still working to figure out exactly what is going on in the eyes that get glaucoma.

Medicated eyedrops are applied to control the eye pressure at a level that prevents progression of the disease in each person. This level will vary from person to person.