Glaucoma treatment. A review of people with primary open-angle glaucoma and ocular hypertension concluded that medical IOP lowering treatment slowed down the progression of visual field loss. Vascular flow and neurodegenerative theories of glaucomatous optic neuropathy have prompted studies on various neuroprotective therapeutic strategies, including nutritional compounds, some of which may be regarded by clinicians as safe for use now, while others are on trial. Intraocular pressure can be lowered with medication, usually eye drops. Several classes of medications are used to treat glaucoma, with several medications in each class. Each of these medicines may have local and systemic side effects.
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