What are the glaucoma treatment risks?

What are the glaucoma treatment risks? The risks depend on the glaucoma treatment that we recommend to you. The risk of medical treatment will depend on the type of medication that we’ve recommended to you. People can sometimes experience side effects when taking drops, such as the gritty sensation or stinging sensation when they put the drops in.

Some more general side effects are important, and that’s why we take a thorough medical history before we decide on the medical treatment that is appropriate for you. So for instance, if you have asthma we sometimes would avoid using specific drops because it can interact with your medical condition.

Glaucoma laser treatments

Concerning glaucoma laser treatments, that’s a different question. One risk associated that is there going to be a reaction to the laser treatment straight after the treatment? For instance, there can be a short-lived elevation of eye pressure immediately after the treatment.

That’s why we monitor you before you go home to make sure that we protect you from that particular risk and we have therapies that we add to your laser treatment if necessary. Another reaction can be that immediately after the laser treatment your vision is blurred for a short period of time i.e. the day of the treatment. This can be because of the drops we use to prepare your eye for the treatment, the bright light we use to apply the laser and occasionally there is a bit of bleeding at the time of the treatment. This almost always settles quickly. Rarely, if your eye becomes inflamed after the treatment and doesn’t settle then your vision can become blurred. This is why we prescribe anti-inflammatory eye drops after the treatment to mitigate against this.

The risks associated with glaucoma surgical treatments are different as well. All forms of eye operations will involve an element of risk albeit uncommon or rare these are risks that we should explain to you before you undertake this sort of treatment. And they include things like infection, bleeding within the eye, or changes in your vision.

The thing about all of these risks is that they’re very uncommon, they’re all treatable, but rarely they can result in some irreversible change in your vision. So it’s important that we talk you through all of these risks before you agree to proceed with our treatment.

As far as glaucoma trabeculectomy surgery is concerned, this is one of the biggest operations that we do in glaucoma surgery, and there are risks associated with the control of the eye pressure. And that’s why we monitor you in the clinic for the first three to four weeks after the glaucoma operation to make sure that we identify any of those problems if they were to occur.

While these risks are uncommon and treatable, it’s important to remember that the reason why we’re recommending this treatment to you is that we want to slow down the visual deterioration induced by your glaucoma. And once this deterioration has happened it’s irreversible.