Future Thinking for Glaucoma

Happy New Year to all! Hopefully 2022 will be healthy and prosperous for you and your families! January is typically glaucoma awareness month, but I didn’t want to just do the usual “here’s what it is, here’s what it does, and here’s how to treat it” blog. Instead, I was wanting to do a “new thoughts or innovations with treatment of glaucoma”, still a leading cause of blindness in the United States. Without getting too technical I wanted to share with you some future thoughts on treating glaucoma.



Typically with glaucoma the thought is about eye pressure, how it affects the eye, and the drops used to lower the pressure. This, of course, is understandable since glaucoma is a lot about sensitivity to pressure in the eye. However, since glaucoma is not curable(yet), research is also being done to either protect the nerve tissue in the eye, or to regenerate the nerve tissue.

The optic nerve is made up of axons from retinal ganglion cells, and with sensitivity to eye pressure these axons degenerate, followed by death of ganglion cells themselves. What follows is loss of vision, and visual field. Unfortunately death of ganglion cells is permanent at the moment, but the research being done is aimed at protecting the ganglion cells from being susceptible to damage from glaucoma. This is the neuroprotection end of the research.

The other end of the research focuses on regeneration of new axons or replacing lost ganglion cells. This is being done with stem cell transplantation and would be very beneficial to people with more advanced glaucoma, or vision loss. Goals of this research are to identify the mechanisms causing or contributing to neurodegeneration, and also to identify any barriers that exist to regeneration of nerve tissue.

As an Optometrist I found this very interesting and exciting. If you have glaucoma, or have a family member with glaucoma, you know how debilitating it can be over time. Hopefully this future is not far off so that vision and visual field can be restored if lost, or it can be another way to prevent the loss(other than using eye drops)!

Until next time...