New device makes glaucoma surgery safer

Glaucoma is a disease of the optic nerves wherein the nerve fibers progressively disappear causing the field of vision to become narrower and narrower until total blindness ensues.

For patients with glaucoma, it is important to keep the internal eye pressure low, otherwise the damage to the optic nerves gets worse. Usually glaucoma medications will lower eye pressure but sometimes they don’t work very well.

One example is patient ABC. He had very severe glaucoma in both eyes, and, despite four different eye drops, placed one after the other during the course of the day, the targeted eye pressure of 12 mmHg or below could not be achieved. In the right eye, pressure was 26 mmHg, and in the left 20 mmHg.

Ordinarily, a glaucoma filtering operation, where a window in created to act as a passageway of the fluid within the eye to the outside, would be recommended. The problems with the original procedure in the immediate period after surgery would be inflammation and too much exiting of the fluid. Technological improvements have made the procedure less traumatic and much safer.

A patient who benefited from the new technology is Mr. ABC. He chose to follow the recommendation of having a stainless tube-like implant placed in his eye instead. The implant called an Ex-press shunt creates a passageway for the fluid to exit the eye in a controlled manner.

His right eye was operated on first; the procedure took 35 minutes under local anesthesia. The eye was not patched and anti-inflammatory and antibiotic drops were given. His eye pressure went down to almost 10 mmHg even without any glaucoma drops. There was only mild inflammation at the site of operation, otherwise the patient was comfortable.

Mr. ABC was so relieved that he soon scheduled his left eye.

Galileo SurgiCenter believes that the Ex-press shunt which is distributed by Alcon Laboratories is a significant improvement over the traditional filtering surgery where the post-operative course would sometimes be complicated.