The Progress Of Investigation And The Expectation Of Glaucoma

Glaucoma is one of the leading causes of irreversible blindness worldwide. Early diagnosis and effective treatment may remarkably decrease the rate of blindness patients. And the final common pathway of glaucomatous optic neuropathy is retinal ganglion cells death. Because lowering intraocular pressure is not always sufficient to halt the progression of this optic neuropathy, there has been considerable effort to develop therapeutics that prevent or delay the retinal ganglion cells from undergoing primary/ secondary degeneration. This therapeutic strategy is termed neuroprotection. In future, optic neuroprotection in glaucoma will likely become an important adjunctive therapy with other cares including intraocular pressure-lowering treatment to lessen the primary/ secondary insults of retinal ganglion cells. While glaucomatous damages also have been found in the central visual system, including lateral geniculate nucleus and visual cortex. Recent studies have indicated that glaucoma is a neurodegenerative disease. This article reviews the recent advances on the diagnosis and the treatment of the disease, and expatiates the pathomorphology and pathologic mechanisms of glaucomatous damages in the central visual system, the mechanisms of glaucomatous optic nerve damage, the recent investigation about apoptosis of retinal ganglion cell and the treatment with neuroprotection. At last, it has a expectation about the future direction and the progress of investigation in the field of glaucoma.