I put glaucoma drops in but I feel no improvement. What should I do?

If a glaucoma patient puts drops in but feels no improvement, they should seek medical help.

Ophthalmologist João Matias reminds us that, in these cases, treatment should not be interrupted:

You should not do anything and the person should maintain the medication they are taking. This is because glaucoma is a degenerative disease of the optic nerve associated normally with increased intraocular pressure in which there is no possibility of recovering the lost vision, and therefore the aim of the treatment is essentially not to lose more vision or more of the visual field associated with glaucoma.

And the function of the drops and the other treatments available is to fulfil this objective by lowering intraocular pressure - which is the only way known and proven so far to stop the progression of the disease.

However, I would like to emphasise the importance of follow-up consultations, after the diagnosis of glaucoma and the rate of treatment, with your ophthalmologist to assess whether the treatment is being successful. On the one hand, there are perception errors: often this is an older population and, after a first consultation in which the diagnosis and treatment was explained, the patient has a lot of information to absorb and often does not understand the purpose of the treatment prescription or its duration. On the other hand, we must also, during these follow-up appointments, evaluate the effectiveness of the treatment that the patient is undergoing, that is, assessing whether there is an effective reduction in eye pressure and stabilisation of the disease. And lastly - and also very important to evaluate - safety: if there are any local or systemic side effects, which are rarely serious, but which sometimes may lead to a change in medication - either by changing the drops to another ophthalmologic class in which these side effects may not be observed, or by proposing other treatments available for glaucoma, which in the case of this disease are essentially laser and surgery.

In tomorrow's programme we will continue to take questions about glaucoma treatment.

With the support of the Portuguese Society of Ophthalmology.