Numbers help tell the story of glaucoma diagnosis, treatment

In general, if we can put a number on something, it is easier to understand and interpret. Advanced diagnostics along with older well-established techniques are providing us more numbers, and especially more reliable numbers, to better diagnose and treat glaucoma.IOP is a number we have followed for more than a century. Yet, we need better numbers even for this old reliable marker. Ideally, we need to know the patient’s IOP at least every hour 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to fully understand an individual’s disease, response to therapy and adequacy of treatment. In addition, it would be extremely helpful to know at least the patient’s blood pressure, systolic and diastolic, 24/7, as they say. Even better, an exact measurement of blood flow at the optic nerve, along with the pO2 to measure for things such as sleep apnea, would be great.