Novel Imaging Targets for Detecting Early Progression of Glaucoma

Glaucoma is an age-related visual disorder that affects the lives of 2% of the population aged over 40 years and up to 5% of those aged over 70 years. Glaucoma places a large burden both on the health care system with increasing treatment costs, and on care-givers from physicians to family members of the affected. More importantly, studies have repeatedly shown that glaucoma is a disabling disease that significantly diminishes the patient's quality of life, even with mild to moderate disease severity. Successful treatment outcomes depend primarily on early detection of disease and its progression. The current grant proposal deals with strategies to detect early disease progression and their translation into clinical practice to ensure not only success in stalling the biological progression of the disease but maintaining good quality of life. In order to do this we will investigate a variety of anatomical structures that are affected in this disease with novel imaging tools. We will track the progress of patients with glaucoma tested and develop analysis techniques to translate the findings to clinical practice. If we can show that we can detect progression of the disease earlier, we may be able to identify individuals that need different intervention in their management and therefore provide a better prognosis.