What Is Glaucoma?

Glaucoma ( Kala Motia in Urdu) is sometimes called the silent thief because it can slowly steal your sight before you realize anything's wrong. It's a leading cause of vision loss.
The most common form of glaucoma, primary open-angle glaucoma, develops gradually, giving no warning signs. Many people aren't even aware they have an eye problem until their vision is extensively compromised.
Glaucoma is not just one disease, but a group of them. The common feature of these diseases is damage to the optic nerve, usually accompanied by an abnormally high pressure inside your eyeball.
The optic nerve is a bundle of more than a million nerve fibers at the back of your eye. It's like an electric cable made up of thousands of individual wires carrying the images from the inside back wall of your eyeball (retina) to your brain. Blind spots develop in your visual field when the optic nerve deteriorates, usually starting with your peripheral (side) vision. If left untreated, glaucoma may lead to blindness in both eyes.
Though deaths from asthma do occur, they are mercifully rare. According to expert Elliott Pearl, MD, only about 4,000 people a year die from asthma in the U.S., which sounds like a lot until you take into account that 15 million people in the U.S. suffer from the condition. Most of the people who die of the disease do not have it under good control with available medication. Pearl is an allergist and immunologist at ENTAAcare, a collection of ear, nose, throat, allergy, and asthma specialists working in the Annapolis-Baltimore, Md., area.

Asthma is treated with two types of medication. Short-acting "rescue" medication, usually in the form of an inhaler or bronchodilator containing a drug that opens the airways, can be taken to stop an episode of asthma in its tracks. Longer-acting "maintenance" medications, such as pills or inhalers that have an anti-inflammatory action, are taken every day to prevent an attack from occurring.