Glaucoma ducts, and narrowing or closure of the angle between the iris and cornea. The primary division in categorizing different types of glaucoma is open-angle and closed-angle (or angle-closure) glaucoma. In open angle glaucoma, the iris meets the cornea normally, allowing the fluid from inside the eye to drain, thus relieving the internal pressure. Where this angle is narrowed or closed, pressure increases over time, causing damage to the optic nerve, leading to blindness. Primary open-angle glaucoma (also, "primary glaucoma", "chronic glaucoma") refers to slow clogging of the drainage canals resulting in increased eye pressure which causes progressive optic nerve damage.
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