Glaucoma – Intrigued by the Silent Thief of Sight
Guest Lecture by Dr Katia Papastavrou, Ophthalmologist at Pantheo Eye Centre Glaucoma has been recognised as an entity since the begging of medical history. Despite great leaps in our ability to diagnose and treat glaucoma, it is still today one of the major causes of blindness both in the developed and developing world. Its ability to afflict an individual for many years without causing symptoms, until its final stages when irreversible blindness ensues, has earned it the title “The silent thief of sight”. This lecture will outline the pathophysiology and understanding of what was once thought a simple disease process. Like most fields of medicine ,the more we learn the more we realise how little we know about the underlying factors that cause and influence the progression of human illness. And so it is with glaucoma, what was considered a condition of high intraocular pressure is now a complex combination of biomechanics, race, heredity and cellular apoptosis. Treatment regimes target different factors in an individualised patient basis and great developments in imaging and diagnosis are helping with this endeavour. In the past decade research has allowed a better understanding of the role of wound healing in the success rate of glaucoma surgery and allowed treatment to be modified and as a result more successful. The results of both Pantheon Eye Centre work and other centres will be presented with clinical examples which support the current clinical evidence that early detection and aggressive glaucoma management is the way forward.
