On December 12, a group of Professor Toru Nakazawa and Assistant Professor Noriko Himori of the Department of Ophthalmology, Graduate School of Medicine, Tohoku University announced that they have clarified the relationship between systemic oxidative stress and glaucoma visual field severity in glaucoma patients.
Glaucoma is an eye disease in which the optic nerve is damaged and the visual field is narrowed. It has a high prevalence and is currently the number one cause of blindness.Reducing intraocular pressure with eye drops or surgery is the only effective treatment.However, unlike Europe and the United States, where there are many cases of high-tension glaucoma, the majority of patients with normal-tension glaucoma are in Japan, and the current situation is that there are many glaucoma patients whose condition progresses even if the intraocular pressure is well controlled.As a result, the number of patients with blindness due to glaucoma is still increasing.
Therefore, the research group focused on oxidative stress as a risk factor other than intraocular pressure in glaucoma, and examined the relationship between the severity of glaucoma and the oxidative stress accumulated in the skin in 502 eyes of glaucoma outpatients at Tohoku University Hospital. Examined.Use the AGE reader device to prevent eye damage to skin AGE (a chemical substance produced by a compound in which sugar and amino acids are bound through complicated reaction pathways such as oxidation, dehydration, and condensation), which is an index of oxidative stress. As a result of the measurement, the correlation between the skin AGE value and the visual field severity of glaucoma was confirmed in all cases.
In particular, a strong negative correlation was found between the value of skin AGE and the severity of glaucoma in a relatively young group of glaucoma patients aged 58 years or younger, and as a result of multivariate analysis, skin AGE contributed independently to the severity of glaucoma. It was shown to be a factor.
From these results, it was clarified that glaucoma is more likely to occur in relatively young people when the oxidative stress level is high.Until now, only the treatment of lowering intraocular pressure with eye drops has been the focus of attention for glaucoma, but it has been found that maintaining a healthy general condition is also important for preventing blindness due to glaucoma.It was also suggested that systemic antioxidant treatment in glaucoma patients may be an effective treatment for maintaining visual field.
