Transcript: Tips for optimal management of glaucoma suspects

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Michael Chaglasian, OD, FAAO: Hey everyone, I am Dr. Michael Chaglasian. We are here in Orlando, and I just finished my lecture on the glaucoma suspect, key tips for optimal management. We focused on several key things for ODs to take home to their practices for their glaucoma patients. One of the things that I like to focus on is always looking at risk factors for your glaucoma suspects and patients with ocular hypertension.

Risk factors are the key things that make a decision on whether or not someone needs to be treated or to be observed. And things that go into the risk factors, of course, are things like the pachymetry, the family history, all the typical risk factors that people know about from glaucoma over time. But it is integrating them into the diagnostic side of things where the whole picture comes together.

So, look at your risk factors, use your optical coherence tomography (OCT), use your visual fields, and put the whole picture together. With OCTs, it is always key to know that you have a good quality OCT scan. Do not misinterpret artifact or bad scans, and look at your report and drill down to the areas that really show glaucoma change and match it up to the visual field.

You have been doing perimetry for years, but you really want to match up the OCT for the visual field and make a clinical correlation. And then that cycles back to the risk factors. What is the age of your patient? What is the background? What is the family history?

When people take the time to assimilate all that data together, then they make the best decisions for their patients.

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