World Glaucoma Day is celebrated on March 12th and it marks the start of World Glaucoma Week, a collaborative project between World Glaucoma Association and World Glaucoma Patient Association. The aim of the project is to help eliminate blindness caused by this disease by raising awareness and alerting on the need of having regular eye check-ups in which the optic nerve is examined.
What exactly is glaucoma?
Glaucoma is an eye disease. More specifically, it is a disease that affects the optic nerve initially causing a loss of peripheral vision (in the visual field) in patients If it is not detected early on and properly treated, it may progress towards a more serious vision loss and affect central vision.
Many of the glaucomas have a genetic basis and actually in most of them
there is an elevation of the intraocular pressure that, together with other
factors, causes damage to the optic nerve and provokes an early death of the
nerve cells that compose it.
