Glaucoma is one of the most common eye diseases in the world, and is also one of the leading causes of blindness. Standard treatment approaches to glaucoma have not changed much over the years. Conventional medicine calls for daily eye drops to help treat the symptoms and stave off further progress. Additional alternative treatments can include acupuncture, dietary changes, and herbal remedies.

However, glaucoma patients can find the use of daily eye drops to be difficult to maintain and can find themselves inadvertently wasting medicine. Luckily, new treatment options are under development that can change the face of glaucoma treatment as the world knows it. So, learn about these new technologies and when the new treatments are available, you can be one of the first in line to give them a try. 

Microneedle Injections

Many patients forget to take their daily eye drops, much to the detriment of their ocular health. People get busy or distracted and their eye care may not be the first thing on their minds. Eye doctors understand this and have long been searching for methods to make treatment easier to administer. 

One of the latest developments in this area is the use of drug injections rather than eye drops. These injections would be administered using tiny microneedles barely perceptible to the human eye. The injections would be placed in the exact part of the eye that needed medication and would be absorbed within seconds. 

Additionally, glaucoma treatments using this methodology can last for two weeks, reducing the number of treatments exponentially. While these microneedle injections are not yet available on the market, they likely will be soon.

Medicinal Contact Lenses

Another new and promising innovation in the treatment of glaucoma is the idea of contact lenses that will regularly release the medicine normally administered through eye drops into the eye. These contact lenses would also provide vision correction if needed, or could be completely visually innocuous.

The glaucoma contact lenses would be able to provide a month's worth of treatments in a single lens, making treatment as easy as possible for you to maintain. To avoid vision obstructions, the medicine in the lenses is housed in the periphery (sides) of the lenses, leaving the center clear to allow you to see. 

Implanted Devices

While still primarily in the idea-generation phase of development, researchers are also looking to develop devices that can be implanted into the eye or behind the eye to release glaucoma medications over an extended period of time. With these devices, a patient could go several months or even years without even needing to think about their eye medications. 

These extremely convenient devices would completely alter the way in which glaucoma is treated and medication is administered. Patients would not have to worry about regular eye maintenance or even regular visits to the eye doctor for new injections or contact lenses.

New technologies are being developed to help change the ways in which glaucoma is treated through a company like Leader Heights Eye Center. Keep an eye out for when these new methods are widely available to the public and be one of the first in line to try these convenient and time-saving glaucoma treatments. 

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