CHANDIGARH: Advanced Eye Centre PGIMER Chandigarh plans a chain of activities to commemorate World Glaucoma Week, from March 9 -15, 2025. The main aim is to bring public focus on glaucoma, which affects a large population.
The main highlight of the event is Glaucoma Awareness Walk. It will be organized on March 9th, 2025 at 7 am from Rock Garden - Sukhna Lake to create more understanding and knowledge on Glaucoma, which is seen as the leading cause of irreversible blindness in India.
We have invited many health professionals, people from various organizations, and patients from tri-city areas. Apart from that, we are also focusing disease awareness on patients and caretakers, through various electronic media regularly. Apart from awareness walk, we will have awareness through FM radio and an awareness program for patients and their care takers on subsequent days.
Glaucoma is an entity associated with many risk factors of which the modifiable factor is an increase in eye pressure, and is characterized by damage to the optic nerve leading to irreversible blindness. Most often glaucoma causes silent vision loss as the patient will not be symptomatic till the moderate to an advanced stage.
Early recognition and treatment are at most important to prevent the progression of glaucoma. Glaucoma more commonly affects people beyond the age of 40 years. High myopes, diabetics, and those with a positive family history have a higher risk of developing glaucoma.
Currently, glaucoma affects approximately 80 million people around the world, about half of whom are unaware that they have the disease and may not have access to much needed care. Our country bears a huge chunk of patients, every 8th individual or nearly 40 million has either glaucoma or is at risk of developing the disease. 11.2 million Indians suffer from the disease with 1.1 million blind, including children.
Screening family members of patients with glaucoma is mandatory, as this disease can affect siblings and children of patients with glaucoma in up to 10‐15% of cases.
Advanced Eye Centre PGIMER being a tertiary center, is regularly organizing and participating in various CMEs for general ophthalmologists from the Northern part of the country providing knowledge, skill, and motivation to them. We found that these academic activities helped early diagnosis and timely referral to a higher center at the initial stage of the disease itself.
This is evident from our own exponentially increasing number of patients for the last 8 years. Our team is also providing state of art training for many postgraduates and fellows from various sectors of our nation and making them capable of catering services in their respective areas.
We also conduct a patient education program every year in the Advanced Eye Centre. It helps patients to get knowledge about the disease course, needs for regular follow-up, and adherence to treatment along with video demonstration of how to instill medication efficiently.
Advanced Eye Centre, PGIMER Chandigarh has provided services to 4438 newly registered and 29786 follow-up patients for the period of March 2024 to Feb 2025. Our eminent faculty members are taking all effort to provide all kinds of modern surgical care which is available in India.