What is it about?
There has previously been no effective way to measure the intraocular pressure (eye pressure) while a live person has their eyes closed, and some object pushes on the eye. External ocular compression occurs when you rub your eye, when you have your closed eyes in contact with bedding or your arm when you sleep, when you wear small sized swim goggles, and during certain medical interventions. Elevations in the intraocular pressure (IOP) is a risk factor for the development of visual loss from glaucoma, and even if you are "successfully" treated with eye drops or surgery, these periods of ocular compression will still cause a very large rise in your IOP., and overcome the "successful" treatment effects of the eye drops and surgery. This paper describes the first device that can measure the IOP during these events, and the paper describes how the authors validated the device for use in future clinical research. The same authors have just recently published another paper where the device is used to measure the IOP in 2 of the clinical settings described above.
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Why is it important?
By inventing this new device, and validating it, the scientific community will now have a tool that can be used to assess periods of risk in human behavior that are associated with the production of irreversible blindness. Since everybody sleeps every night of their lives, and since this is a meaningful period of risk when the external ocular compression can raise the eye pressure to very high levels, considerable effort has been expended by the authors on this topic during subsequent research with this device.
Perspectives
The publication of this paper, and the tandem paper that has just been accepted by the same journal, are both very important to me. There is a lot of medical research that is conducted worldwide each year. The current trend in medical research is to attribute disease processes to abnormal genetics, abnormal cellular function, and there is also a bias to explain the molecular basis for diseases. This research is fundamentally different, in that it simply acknowledges that elevated eye pressure (IOP) is something that not only takes place as you go about your day, but also occurs during periods of time when nobody is looking; even if they were, there has previously been no way to measure the IOP during these periods of risk. This new device enables researchers to now ask and answer these questions. Since "sleeping on your eye" is something everybody does from time to time, from birth to death, understanding what is going on inside the eye during this period of risk is vitally important, since it literally affects every person on Earth, to various degrees. The authors delve more thoroughly into this topic in their next paper, where the device that is validated in this paper is used in real clinical settings where the population is at risk.
Dr Michael Stanton Korenfeld
Comprehensive Eye Care, Ltd.
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A new device to noninvasively estimate the intraocular pressure produced during ocular compression, Clinical Ophthalmology, January 2016, Dove Medical Press,
DOI: 10.2147/opth.s92954.
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