There is now a new glaucoma treatment, called canaloplasty. “Traditional glaucoma surgery, called trebeculectomy, has quite a few risks associated with it,” said Dr. David Richardson, San Gabriel Valley Medical Center.
In the most common surgical procedure for glaucoma, doctors penetrate the eye and create a hole to reduce the pressure. In canaloplasty it’s completely different. Doctors say to think of it as “angioplasty for the eye.”
“With canaloplasty we do not penetrate the eye,” said Richardson.
Instead, Richardson cuts a tiny flap at the top of the eye. Surgeons find an opening in the eye’s natural drainage system, insert a micro-catheter to expand the canal and then keep it open with a stent.
“This surgery is really the first surgery that allows us to give patients with glaucoma a surgical treatment before they get to that end stage of glaucoma,” said Dr. Richardson.
