Empowered Patient Podcast Detecting and Treating Progressive Eye Disease Keratoconus with Dr. Clark Chang Glaukos
Dr. Clark Chang is a cornea and keratoconus, KC, specialist at Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia and the Director of Global Medical Affairs at Glaukos. Keratoconus is a disease of the eye where tissue thins and gradually bulges outward into a cone-like shape. While changes in the cornea are small, vision becomes very blurry, and the underlying cause may be overlooked. Glaukos has introduced the iLink procedure, a minimally invasive outpatient procedure to slow or halt the progression of this disease and help patients preserve their vision.
Clark explains, "It is associated with age, but it's in the different group of people than most of your audience is thinking. We're very familiar with conditions like age-related macular degeneration. Everybody knows that because it's very impactful to one's vision, and the fear of loss of vision has frequently been rated as one of the top one or two biggest fears in a person's life. Most diseases are age-related in that they can occur with time. This disease more commonly occurs during puberty or in younger patients."
"In order to be able to diagnose this condition, especially at an early stage when there is an extremely small amount of change in the alteration in the shape of the cornea, you really need sophisticated diagnostic technology that we usually call topographer or tomographer. Basically, it maps out the shape of the cornea, either just at the front or front and back of your cornea. Being able to, in a more sensitive way, figure out whether or not there's any small amount of area that's becoming misshapen more than what a normal cornea or tissue would look like."
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