More powerful glaucoma meds would preserve long-term vision

Introducing more powerful medications earlier in glaucoma treatment would help preserve long-term vision, according to a French study.

Jean Phillippe Nordmann, MD, and colleagues attempted to quantify the clinical outcome of glaucoma treatment throughout a patient’s life to, in turn, identify treatment parameters that would preserve vision across a population.

They used a Markov model “to reproduce glaucoma treatments and clinical responses over a patient’s lifetime,” going chronologically from first-line to fourth-line treatments, followed by no treatment, laser surgery, blindness and/or death.

When highly effective drugs — those deemed best at controlling IOP — were prescribed as first-line or second-line treatments, they reduced laser therapy, surgery and the occurrence of blindness, researchers said.

“According to our model,” they added, “drugs specifically able to arrest disease progression would be more beneficial than IOP control.”

The study is published in the December issue of Journal of Glaucoma.