What are the leading causes of blindness?
Glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration are two of the leading causes of blindness in Americans. Janine Austin Clayton, MD, of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), describes who is at risk and ways to catch these problems early.
Transcript
And we can make a big difference in this blinding disease by catching people early. We've got drops. We've got lasers. We've got surgical procedures.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Glaucoma is the leading cause of blindness in African-Americans. Age-related macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness in white Americans.
Glaucoma can be treated when caught early. But it takes away your peripheral vision, and you don't notice it until it's progressed.
So we need people to be checked. We need their eye pressure to be checked. That's one of the aspects of glaucoma. We also now know that the instruments
that we use to check eye pressure, if your cornea-- which is like your crystal on your watch-- is thinner, that instrument is not
calibrated to give you the correct reading for the pressure. And we actually know African-Americans tend to have thinner corneas.
Well, that doesn't matter, right? Except for the tool that we're using to measure your eye pressure is giving a falsely low reading.
So those are the kinds of ways that, the way of thinking about we're all different and unique in biological ways.
And we need to make sure our medical and diagnostic treatments, diagnostic interventions and treatments,
are designed specifically to address those differences. It's something that's very powerful. And we can make a big difference in this blinding disease
by catching people early. We've got drops. We've got lasers. We've got surgical procedures. We have an array of ways to prevent vision loss.
And for age-related macular degeneration as well, in the last five years, amazing discoveries have allowed us to preserve vision longer and prevent
progression of disease. [AUDIO LOGO]
eye health
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