Glaucoma is infamous as ΄the sneak thief of sight΄: the most common types give no warning they are slowly, progressively destroying a person΄s vision. Because usually the vision at first is affected to the side, patients notice little, if anything. By the time an individual realizes something is wrong, there may have been considerable damage.

Why write a book about it? And why dedicate it to all patients with glaucoma, to their relatives and friends, to the general community as well as to ophthalmologists, other doctors and eye health care practitioners who wish to be familiar with management of this group of diseases?

Undisturbed, glaucoma blinds people. It respects neither gender nor education; it ignores wealth and privilege. We have no cure for it and we cannot reverse the damage that it has caused. Glaucoma affects about 2% of people over 40 years of age. It is not rare. It is the commonest cause of irreversible and preventable visual disability everywhere.

But most of the time we can control it. Successful protection of vision depends in part on how much damage has been done when first detected and how aggressive the disease is for an individual patient. So the earlier glaucoma is diagnosed, the less damage that has been caused, the better the long-term outlook.

Early detection requires informed communities whose members seek eye examinations as well as knowledgeable and appropriately equipped eye health care professionals who recognize subtle warning signs and arrange timely ophthalmological confirmation and initiation of effective treatment. This requires access to a worthwhile health system.

Even in developed societies, about 50% of patients with glaucoma have not been diagnosed and are not on treatment. Half of these undiagnosed people have been seen by an eye health care practitioner in the last two years.

We wish to enlighten our readers with quality information to minimise visual disability from glaucoma.