Stealthy Sight-Stealer

Thousands of Americans over 40 who conscientiously have regular medical checkups are getting a clean bill of health when actually they are suffering from an insidious disease that may cause blindness. So said a Memphis ophthalmologist last week at a sight-saving conference* in Manhattan. The often overlooked disease: glaucoma. Reported the University of Tennessee's Dr. Margaret Horsley, after a five-month 'study just completed at the John Gaston Hospital's clinics: 44 cases of glaucoma were found among patients who did not suspect that they had anything wrong with their eyes.

Glaucoma results from an increase in the pressure of the watery fluid inside the eyeball, which ''backs up" because it gets into the eye in normal amounts but cannot drain out fast enough through narrowed or diseased channels. It usually begins painlessly, and in such cases the first sign of its onset is the loss of side vision. Said Dr. Horsley: "The unsuspecting victim is sometimes almost completely blind before he realizes his visual loss. It is heartbreaking to have to tell these patients that they will never be able to regain the sight they have lost, and may even lose what little vision they have left because treatment has been instituted so late."

Taken in hand early, glaucoma can be effectively controlled in most cases. For the majority of patients, specially prescribed eye drops will lower the pressure to normal. In certain cases, where drugs do not reduce the tension sufficiently, surgery is often useful. Of victims who did not get treatment in time, 40,000 are now blind and 150,000 partially blind; estimates of U.S. glaucoma victims runs as high as a million, with half of them unaware that they have it.

Said Dr. Horsley: "The only hope of finding all the early glaucomas walking around the U.S. lies in routine tonometry [testing of eye pressure] by the general practitioner."

* Sponsored by the Pan American Association of Ophthalmology and the National Society for the Prevention of Blindness.

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