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Diagnosis And Treatment Of Glaucoma

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Introduction:
Glaucoma is the second-leading cause of blindness in the world, affecting around 2.5 million people in the United States,1 and the incidence is increasing. In 2010, approximately 45 million people were diagnosed with open angle glaucoma in the world and it is estimated that in 2020, these numbers will increase to 59 million in the world with 3.5 million cases in the United States.2 Glaucoma can lead to irreversible blindness in 12.3% of the cases.2

Because vision loss in glaucoma is irreversible, early diagnosis and treatment of glaucoma is critical for decreasing blindness worldwide.3 Since studies have shown that optic nerve changes and retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) thinning can precede visual field loss in early …show more content…

71.3 ± 13.5 for NTG, P-value < 0.005).11 However, all these imaging studies evaluated RNFL thickness for POAG and NTG patients but not for secondary types of OAG such as pseudoexfoliation glaucoma (PXG) and pigmentary glaucoma (PDG).

Open angle glaucoma (OAG) is the most common form of glaucoma, accounting for more than 90% of total glaucoma cases.15 Among different subtypes of OAG, POAG is the most common and progressive type of OAG in the United States.16-18 Other subtypes of OAG include NTG, PXG, and PDG.

The purpose of the current study is to evaluate whether there are different patterns of RNFL thinning among the different subtypes of open angle glaucoma and also to compare these glaucoma patients with normal patients who had been imaging with Spectralis spectral domain OCT (Heidelberg

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