Glaucoma This manifests as a gradual loss of the visual field, starting with a loss of peripheral vision, but eventually the entire vision will be lost if not treated. This is the most common type of glaucoma, accounting for 90% of cases in the United States, but fewer in Asian countries. Onset is slow and painless, and loss of vision is gradual and irreversible. Narrow-angle glaucoma (also "closed-angle glaucoma") the iris bows forward, narrowing the angle that drains the eye, increasing pressure within the eye. If untreated, it can lead to the medical emergency of angle-closure glaucoma. In angle-closure glaucoma (also
Normal tension glaucoma of cases that have been reported in medical literature in the 1980s and 1990s who had the typical signs of glaucomatous damage, like optic nerve head excavation and thinning of the retinal nerve fiber layer, while these patients had an IOP that would generally have been regarded as "normal". It is now widely estimated that a larger percentage of patients with primary open-angle glaucoma (POAG) are suffering from normal tension glaucoma: probably half of all POAG patients in Europe and the majority of POAG patients in East Asia. Among Americans of Japanese descent, for instance, the prevalence of NTG is