Glaucoma Meds?

Has anyone been on eye drops for months or years in order to lower IOP and has not taken it afterwards.

1. Is there any such treatment?

2. Or should eye drops be taken for life?

3. Or such treatment has been given due to misdiagnosis?

Could it be one of the 3 possibilities mentioned above?

If someone has been on drops for a long period of time and then are able to discontinue the drops is usually due to one of a few things.

1) It is possible to have surgical procedures to control your eye pressure. Either a shunt is placed in the eye or a procedure known as an iridotomy is performed. These procedures are usually reserved for patients that do not respond to drops.

2) Sometimes the patient will have a procedure, such as cataract surgery, that will alter the normal anatomical structure in a way that the flow of the fluids is improved and drops are no longer needed.

3) Sometimes a patient can be misdiagnosed. Some people mistakenly think that the way to diagnose glaucoma is when the IOP reaches a certain number to begin using drops to lower the number. Glaucoma actually is dependent upon many factors, the IOP, the apperance of the optic nerve head, the visual field and the thickness of the cornea. For instance, if the cornea's are thick it stands to reason that the person testing the IOP has to put more pressure on the eye to obtain the reading giving false high readings resulting in a misdiagnosis.

Bottom line, there could be a number of reasons a person would start glaucoma drops and then after a while the drops would be discontinued. However, this should be done under supervision of an ophthamologist, and not something done on the patient's own accord

If you have glaucoma the first line of treatment is drops for life.
If you are having problems with the drops talk to your eye doctor.
If you stop taking the drops you risk loss of vision
my dad has glaucoma. he does eye drops at night. to the best of my memory, it costs him $120 for 300 ml. he is on them for life unless his condition deteriorates and needs to take more aggressive medications.

best of luck~
i'm a surgical intern.