Image courtesy of Glaucoma Research Foundation

January is Glaucoma Awareness Month and one local optometrist talks about the risks of this sudden oncoming disease that affects the eyes.

Dr. Kyle Stalder with Central Iowa Family Eye Care in Jefferson and Guthrie Center says there is not a lot of information about glaucoma as it is known as the “silent vision killer” because patients do not often have symptoms that are noticed until part of the peripheral field of vision is lost. 

“What we do know is that as the nerves go back through a hole in the eye to the brain to let us see, those nerves are compressed. And because of that compression that’s what allows those nerves on the peripheral vision to start to die off.”  

Dr. Stalder says the common ways to treat glaucoma is using pressure lowering eye drops, a laser procedure that lessens the pressure on the eye and a surgical procedure to install a filter to decrease the eye pressure. He adds that the pressure lowering eye drops are meant to open the compression on the nerves that go back to the brain, with the idea to spare those nerves that feed to the peripheral vision.