Glaucoma Awareness Week - What you need to know about The Silent Thief of Sight

The first thing to do is not panic, glaucoma is not a sight loss decree with proper management one could save their sight and enjoy it to the fullest. Once you have been diagnosed with a glaucoma patient your optometrist would put you on medication. Glaucoma management drugs are of different categories and effectiveness and so based on what your optometrist observes you would be managed accordingly.

Most often the startup medication for most cases of mild conditions that get cause early starts with timolol maleate which you are probably going to use morning and evening. In cases of very high IOP, you may be given Diamox tablets to help bring the pressure down quicker.

Now it is pertinent that you do not skip your drops, you ought to be religious with your treatment and even it so happens it skips you quickly to get back on track and resume. It is also advisable that you do not wait for your drug to run out completely before you go for a refill.

Leaving your treatment for days, weeks, or even months would bring about rapid deterioration and cause massive damage to your cells that there would have been. Be sure to not skip your review dates and if you notice any extreme side effects with your drugs report to your optometrist to change them for you.

Other things you can do and How to protect yourself

First and foremost let's look at the risk factors that can exacerbate your situation as a glaucoma patient or be a leading cause for you to get the condition. The first one would be Heredity.

Glaucoma tends to run through the family although no specific genes or alleles have yet to be associated and as to whether it is dominant or recessive. But we do know that it can skip generations which probably makes it a recessive allele irrespective it is advisable that if you have a family history of glaucoma you get yourself checkout by an optometrist.

Another point to consider is your geographical location or origins, Africans and African-Americans tend to have open-angle glaucoma whereas individuals of Eastern descent tend to have close-angle glaucoma.

Lifestyle habits such as smoking and alcohol tend to have a long-term negative effect of a rise in intraocular pressure which correlates with the development or progression of glaucoma. It would thus be advisable to let these habits go.

Conditions such as Diabetes and Hypertension also tend to have a positive correlation with the development and progression of glaucoma and other ocular conditions of equally damaging or blinding effects such as proliferative diabetic retinopathy and hypertensive retinopathy. If you have any of these do well to visit your OD often.

The last thing we can do to help protect ourselves and better our glaucoma diagnosis is the adoption of good habits in general. We must do well to eat well, green leafy vegetables are great for the eye they have lots of antioxidants that are good for ocular health.

Citrus and other fruits full of citric acid and other vitamins also does a lot of good for the eye. Vitamin C is the most powerful antioxidant when it comes to the eye although glutathione is well known for the whole system, if you ensure you always have a good amount of vitamin C in your system it would generally help your ocular health. Don't forget to exercise too.

Conclusion

The best way out is early diagnosis, visit your optometrist today if you are yet to, glaucoma is not a blinding sentence. Staying healthy and living healthy as well as being religious with your medication or treatment should just do it.

Nonetheless, if you have any issues you would want to discuss with me you can kindly let me know in the comment section or reach out to me in steemsocial discord channel, same username. Greetings to my friends, professor @lemouth, and my brother from Nigeria @gentleshaid. I do hope that you learned a thing or two from today's lesson though.