An international team of researchers led by Lithuanian scientists provided additional evidence that intracranial pressure plays an important role in normal-tension glaucoma (NTG), with its recent clinical study that demonstrates statistically significant correlations between intracranial pressure, translaminar pressure difference (TPD), and visual field (VF) changes. The study, “The Relationship Between Intracranial Pressure and Visual Field Zones in Normal-Tension Glaucoma Patients,” which was published in Diagnostics, showed that the higher the TPD, the more significant the damage to the patient’s VF, with the most significant VF losses occurring in the nasal zone. Researchers enrolled 80 patients with early-stage normal-tension glaucoma and recorded measurements including IOP, intracranial pressures (ICP), and visual field perimetry.

“Contemporary medicine has methods to treat elevated eye pressure and to slow or even stop the damage to the optic nerve. However, these methods do not work in the case of normal-tension glaucoma. There is a growing awareness among the scientific community that glaucoma is a condition caused by 2 pressures — inside the eye and the skull,” said lead author Professor Arminas Ragauskas, Kaunas University of Technology (KTU), Lithuania, in a news release. Professor Ragauskas is the inventor of an intracranial pressure measurement device that was used in the study to measure brain pressure noninvasively through the eye using ultrasound.