A focus on glaucoma

Abstract

Glaucoma is the focus of the 2022 Clinical and Experimental Ophthalmology Special Issue. This condition has a worldwide prevalence of approximately 3.5%, 1 and it is the most common cause of irreversible blindness globally. 2 Across eight articles, our Special Issue covers a range of glaucoma-related topics, including epidemiology and public health, 3 genetics and personalised risk assessment, 4 pathogenesis, 5 ophthalmic imaging for diagnosis and monitoring, 6 medical therapy 7 and surgical management, 8 plus childhood glaucoma 9 and normaltension glaucoma. 10 I anticipate that this collection of articles, authored by experts in the field from Australia, Brazil, Hong Kong SAR and the United States, will wet the reader's appetite for additional content on glaucoma; over the past 2 years, Clinical and Experimental Ophthalmology has published close to 30 articles on various aspects of this important condition.Several papers have showed the value of optical coherence tomography (OCT) in identifying and following glaucoma. Chen et al. 11 employed anterior segment swept source-OCT to measure various iris dimensions in 40 individuals with primary open-angle glaucoma and 114 healthy persons. A comparison of the parameters between the groups demonstrated that iris area (with cutoff set at 1.43 mm 2 ) had an 85% sensitivity and a 65% specificity for identifying those people with glaucoma. In the report of a cross-sectional study of 100 eyes with open angles, suspected of glaucoma or having recently developed glaucoma, plus a longitudinal study of 61 eyes, the PROGRESSA Study Group 12 compared common spectral domain-OCT machines. They showed that different devices were equally effective in tracking progression of nerve fibre layer and ganglion cell layer/inner plexiform layer changes, and found that nerve fibre layer loss advanced relatively rapidly.The main focus of glaucoma management is reduction of intraocular pressure, and numerous life-style factors have been shown to impact the pressure level. Vera et al. 13 followed up on previous observations related to two common and unrelated factors: consumption of caffeine and low-intensity exercise, known to, respectively, increase and decrease the intraocular pressure. In a placebo-controlled, double-blind, balanced cross-over