What is glaucoma surgery?
Glaucoma surgery is a procedure your eye doctor uses to lower the pressure inside your eye. There are many different types of surgeries for glaucoma. A doctor can perform some procedures in their office or a surgery clinic, but some operations have to be done at the hospital.
Doctors usually try other kinds of treatment first. Sometimes, surgery is the best or only option.
How does surgery help glaucoma?
The front of each eye is filled with a gel-like fluid called aqueous humor, or aqueous for short. It keeps your eye nourished and helps give it its shape.
Aqueous is always draining out of your eye through a microscopic web called the trabecular meshwork. It drains out of the eye around the edges of your iris (the colored part of your eye).
The point where fluid drains is called the drainage angle. Once it's filtered, the fluid goes back into your bloodstream.
Glaucoma usually happens when too much pressure builds up inside your eye and damages your optic nerve.
All light signals from the outside world have to travel along your optic nerve to get to your brain. This is how you "see" something. When the optic nerve is damaged, you can permanently lose part or all of your vision.
High eye pressure usually happens for one or both of these reasons:
Your trabecular meshwork doesn't let aqueous fluid drain out of your eye as well as it should.
Your iris is blocking some or all of your drainage angle.
Glaucoma surgery helps your eye drain more of the backed-up aqueous fluid, so the pressure can go down in the rest of your eye. This protects your optic nerve from future damage.
Eye doctors can use many different types of glaucoma surgery to make this happen.
