World Glaucoma Week | This "killer" is a bit cruel, stealing and taking away your eyesight

Mentioning glaucoma

What do you think?

Eye swelling, easy to cause blindness, irreversible

Don’t think these are far away from you.

Some bad habits in our daily life

It may induce glaucoma (such as playing with your phone with the lights off)

March 12th to 18th is World Glaucoma Week, with the theme of "Pay attention to glaucoma: consensus protects vision, guidance protects light."

Today we invited Dr. Zhou Jichao, an ophthalmologist at Peking University Third Hospital , to introduce us to the "eyesight thief" glaucoma, and authoritatively explain what factors cause glaucoma? What should we do if we have glaucoma? How to prevent glaucoma?

Worldwide, glaucoma is the leading irreversible cause of blindness.

The first key word: the number of people is huge. According to conservative estimates, there are 22 million glaucoma patients in China alone. What does 22 million mean? This means that about one in every 63 people suffers from glaucoma, which shows how common it is. In my country, there are still 6.3 million patients who have become blind due to glaucoma.

The second keyword: irreversible blinding eye diseases. We have heard many stories of people regaining their sight, most of which are about corneal and cataract blindness, which can be restored, but we have almost never heard of a patient who was blinded by glaucoma regaining his sight. This is actually a heavy burden on individuals.

Glaucoma is also known as the "thief of vision", which steals your vision and visual field quietly. Many glaucoma patients have this symptom in the late stage, not because of poor vision, but because of tubular vision. You should know that blindness is not only caused by poor vision, but also when the visual field is extremely reduced.

There is a type of glaucoma that is like a robber, openly robbing your eyesight. This type of glaucoma is called acute glaucoma attack. As the name suggests, it is both urgent and severe. The patient will suffer a lot, with red and painful eyes, decreased vision, and swollen eyes. It is accompanied by headaches, nausea, and vomiting. Forget eating, everything in the stomach will be vomited out.

Acute glaucoma attack is an ophthalmic emergency, so what should we do?

First, don't try to do something at home to relieve it. No! It's almost impossible to get better on your own.

Second, it is called an emergency because how much vision you will have in the future depends largely on how soon you get to the hospital or whether you treat it in time. When you get to the hospital, the ophthalmologist will use eye drops, take oral medication, infuse, puncture the eyeball, use laser, and even perform surgery if necessary. In short, the doctor will not let you go unless you lower your intraocular pressure after using all possible methods.

To prevent glaucoma, we must first understand the pathogenesis of glaucoma. We can simply think of the eyeball as a room. The degree of crowding in the room determines whether glaucoma will occur.

Imagine that there is a circle of sewers all around the room. These sewers are responsible for draining water outwards. If the drainage is not smooth, or the sewers are very crowded and very narrow, the water cannot be drained out, it is easy to cause high intraocular pressure, that is, swollen eyes.

So under what circumstances does the eyeball easily become crowded?

One of the situations is that the pupil is dilated on the basis of hyperopia and the elderly. When the light in our home environment is dim, the eyes dilate the pupil to let in more light in order to see clearly. In other words, people with high hyperopia and the elderly should turn on the lights at home as much as possible, avoid staying in a particularly dim environment for too long, and try to avoid going to dim movie theaters and other environments.

END

Editor: Guru