Glaucoma Is Attacking The US Population

Glaucoma Is Attacking The US Population.
The changing makeup of the US populace is expected to precedent to an increase in cases of glaucoma, the leading cause of vision injury in the country, experts say. A number of demographic and health trends have increased the calculate of Americans who fall into the major risk groups for glaucoma healthbuy. These trends include: the aging of America, intumescence in the black and Hispanic populations, the ongoing obesity epidemic.

And as more people become at risk, proportional eye exams become increasingly important, eye experts say. Early detection of glaucoma is leading to preserving a person's sight, but eye exams are the only way to catch the cancer before serious damage is done to vision bowtrolcoloncleanse. "The big thing about glaucoma is that it doesn't have any signs or symptoms," said Dr Mildred Olivier of the Midwest Glaucoma Center in Hoffman Estates, Ill, and a billet fellow of Prevent Blindness America.

And "By the time someone says, 'Gosh, I have a problem,' they are in the end stages of glaucoma. It's already bewitched most of their sight away. That's why we call glaucoma 'the skulk thief of sight.'"

Glaucoma currently affects more than 4 million Americans, although only half have been diagnosed, according to the Glaucoma Research Foundation. It's cited as the cause of 9 to 12 percent of all cases of blindness in the United States, with about 120000 society blinded by the disease.

Glaucoma is most often caused by an wax in the average fluid pressure inside the eye, according to the US National Eye Institute. The added press damages the optic nerve, the bundle of more than a million nerve fibers that send signals from the eyeball to the brain. In most cases, people first notice that they have glaucoma when they begin to lose their circumferential vision.

By then, it's too late to save much of their eyesight. "Glaucoma is the number one cause of irreversible but avoidable blindness," said Dr Louis B Cantor, chairman and professor of ophthalmology at the Indiana University School of Medicine and skipper of the glaucoma rite at the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Eye Institute in Indianapolis. "By the heyday it's noticeable, 70 to 90 percent of idea has been lost. Once it's gone, it's gone. There's no retrieving vision unsalvageable to glaucoma".

The most common risk factor for glaucoma is simply surviving. "Glaucoma is a disease of aging. The endanger of developing glaucoma goes up considerably with aging". As the population of the United States ages, the enumerate of glaucoma cases will naturally increase. As Olivier said, "We're just universal to have more people who are older and living longer, so we'll have more glaucoma".

Diabetes degrades vision

Diabetes degrades vision.
Less than half of adults who are losing their perception to diabetes have been told by a mend that diabetes could damage their eyesight, a new study found. Vision impoverishment is a common complication of diabetes, and is caused by damage that the chronic disease does to the blood vessels within the eye. The facer can be successfully treated in nearly all cases, but Johns Hopkins researchers found that many diabetics aren't taking tribulation of their eyes, and aren't even aware that vision loss is a potential problem box 4rx. Nearly three of every five diabetics in risk of losing their sight told the Hopkins researchers they couldn't remembrance a doctor describing to them the link between diabetes and vision loss.

The study appeared in the Dec 19, 2013 online progeny of the journal JAMA Ophthalmology. About half of people with diabetes said they hadn't seen a health-care provider in the prior year. And two in five hadn't received a crammed eye exam with dilated pupils, the study authors noted vimax. "Many of them were not getting to someone to look over them for eye problems," said study leader Dr Neil Bressler, a professor of ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

And "That's a besmirch because in many of these cases you can bonus this condition if you catch it in an early enough stage," added Bressler, who is also chief of the retina disagreement at the Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute. One-third of the people said they already had suffered some delusion loss related to their diabetes, according to the report. Bressler said vision damage can be prevented or halted in 90 percent to 95 percent of cases, but only if doctors get to patients instantly enough.

Drugs injected into the sidelong glance can reduce swelling and lower the risk of vision loss to less than 5 percent. Laser psychotherapy has also been used to treat the condition, the researchers said. Dr Robert Ratner, most important scientific and medical officer for the American Diabetes Association, called the findings "frightening" and "depressing. This writing-paper is an excellent example of where the American health care delivery system has fallen down in an ground where we can clearly do better".

For the study, researchers used survey data collected by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between 2005 and 2008 to evaluation the responses of people with model 2 diabetes who had "diabetic macular edema". This condition occurs when high blood sugar levels associated with unprofessionally controlled diabetes cause damage to the small blood vessels in the retina, the light-sensitive mass lining the back wall of the eye. As the vessels leak or shrink, they can cause bulge in the macula - a spot near the retina's center that is responsible for your central vision.

Treat Glaucoma Before It Is Too Late

Treat Glaucoma Before It Is Too Late.
Alan Leighton discovered he had glaucoma when he noticed a gray zone of show in his left eye. that was in 1992. "I ruminate I had it a long time before that, but I didn't know until then," said Leighton, 68, a corporate treasurer who lives in Indianapolis natural remedies for weight loss cinnamon. "glaucoma is with that. It's sneaky".

Leighton made an selection with his ophthalmologist to see what was wrong prices. "We went for a bunch of tests, and he unyielding there was an issue with that eye, and that I had normal pressure glaucoma," he said.

His response was unsentimental and pragmatic: His progenitors has a history of glaucoma, so the news wasn't a total surprise. "I indisputable that we needed to take the most proactive methods we could," Leighton said. "I would go to the best grass roots I could find and see what methods they had to address it and keep it from getting worse. I wanted to dungeon it from affecting my right eye, which was relatively clear. I didn't know what the process was wealthy to be to actually stop the glaucoma or reverse it, if it was even possible. I don't know if there was a lot of sensation involved. It was more like, 'Hey, what can we do about this?'".

He asked if there was any way to restore the sight he'd lost, and the rejoin was no. "They pretty much said that gray area in my left affection was going to stay there, and there was no opportunity to do any procedures to effectively change that," he said. "It had something to do with the optic nerve".