New to Glaucoma (and the forum!)

Hello, everyone.

Thanks to the power of Google I came across this wonderful site.  I'm a 30 year-old in Phoenix, AZ with low/normal pressure Glaucoma.  I was diagnosed in February '07 after switching eye care providers.  For the last handful of years, I had been going to Nationwide Vision Center for my annual eye exams.  They never required me to undergo eye dilation, and not knowing how important that is, I never insisted.  When I switched to my current eye doctor, she dilated my eyes and the rest is history.

I was initially prescribed Travatan Z (one drop per eye, nightly), which caused severe iritis in both eyes.  Next was Alphagan P (one drop per eye, twice daily) which had no positive effect, and instead my IOP was higher after a month's use (from 14 to 16, I believe).  I'm now on Xalatan (one drop per eye, nightly) and find myself wondering what else I can do on my own to help matters.

At this point, I'm very interested in not only learning as much as I can about Glaucoma, but trying to find different things I can do on my own for my general eye health.

If anyone has any tips, advice, or referrals, I would love to hear back from you!  Thanks for this great resource!

Dyanna 

Hi Dyanna, It is actually difficult to find this site in Google right now and that's something I will work on changing in the future (when I get time). You must be a capable Google searcher to have found this glaucoma-related site via Google, so congratulations and welcome!

If you read the blogs on this site you will find lots of discussion about eye health. My advice for anyone with normal tension glaucoma is to look carefully at neuroprotection. Two key issues in neuroprotection are inflammatory immune responses and oxidative stress (and these two are intimately linked with each other). Through nutrition and lifestyle (including stress management), we can have a positive impact on both oxidative stress (which is a measure of the excess free radicals in our system) and inflammatory immune responses. Good nutition, for example, reduces oxidative stress (and reduced oxidative stress can help reduce inflammatory immune responses too). In particular, there is new research showing that DHA (found in fish oil, etc.) is required for certain cells in the eye to produce a chemical called NPD1 (neuroprotective D1). There is also new evidence that this DHA pathway can not only help protect certain nerve cells in the eye, but that it can even help regenerate nerve cells in the cornea. Dietary strategies are increasingly being shown to be of paramount importance in the health of the eye -- and I am optimistic that dietary strategies (such as the proper balance of DHA) and lifestyle are of key importance in normal tension glaucoma. One place you may want to start reading about DHA is a recent article on my blog about Krill oil benefits for vision.

Feel free to post more messages in the forums here. (I will not be able to post much until after May 11th, so please be patient if responses are slow.)