Glaucoma May Be A Brain Disease Rather Than An Eye One
Saturday, June 7, 2014 - 19:30
in Health & Medicine
A new study says the brain, not the eye, controls the cellular process that leads to glaucoma, a finding that may help develop treatments for one of the world's leading causes of irreversible blindness. In the paper, vision scientists and ophthalmologists describe how they performed a data and symmetry analysis of 47 patients with moderate to severe glaucoma in both eyes. In glaucoma, the loss of vision in each eye appears to be haphazard. Conversely, neural damage within the brain caused by strokes or tumors produces visual field loss that is almost identical for each eye, supporting the idea that the entire degenerative process in glaucoma must occur at random in the individual eye — without brain involvement. read more