Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
close window
Housecall Archives
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
close window
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Prevention
By Mayo Clinic staff- Get regular eye care. Regular checkups can help detect glaucoma in its early stages before irreversible damage occurs. As a general rule, have eye exams every two years if you're between the ages of 18 and 60, and every year if you're older than 60. If you have one or more risk factors, you should have eye exams every one to two years until you're 60, and every year after that.
- Treat elevated eye pressure. A large trial at the National Eye Institute found that glaucoma eyedrops could reduce eye pressure by an average of 22 percent. In the same trial, daily use of eyedrops reduced the risk that elevated eye pressure would progress to glaucoma by nearly 50 percent in African-American study participants.
- Control your weight and blood pressure. Recent studies have shown that insulin resistance — which may result from hypertension and obesity — is linked to elevated intraocular pressure
- Wear eye protection. Serious eye injuries can lead to glaucoma. Wear a mask or goggles when you use power tools, play high-speed racket sports on enclosed courts or otherwise risk being hit in the eye.
