OPHTHALMOLOGIC PROFILE OF PATIENTS GOING INTO THE GLAUCOMA WING OF AN UNIVERSITY SERVICE

Abstract

Blindness is a very big onus on society and on the person itself. The glaucoma is one of the biggest causes of blindness in the word. Being an insidious and assymptomatic disease at the onset, its diagnosis is late and the visual losses are irreversible. Having this preocupation, the author accomplished this study to draw the profile of the patients entering the Glaucoma Sector of an University Hospital in order to identify goals to prevent blindness caused by glaucoma. One hundred patients with ocular hypertension and chronic glaucoma were studied. The most relevant exams were the visual acuity, alterations in the optic nerve head and visual field.We found a great number of pacients having at least one of the eyes with vision less or equal to 20/200 (40.69% of the pacients with glaucoma) and other pacients having the same visual acuity in both eyes (6.9% of the eyes with glaucoma). The relation excavation/optic disc bigger or equal to 0,6 was found in 53.4% of the examined eyes and in 57% of them was found asymmetry among the excavation. The visual field showed severe alterations in 57.25% of the eyes with glaucoma, so that it is due to the big glaucornatous optic atrophy in 26% of the eyes. It was observed that patients with glaucoma go to the medical service when major and irreversible alterations are present, limiting its prognosis. Therefore, efforts must be taken in order to minimize such numbers.