Low Vision Aids for Glaucoma (LOVIT Trial)

Our team is interested in what can be done to improve the functioning of patients who suffer from glaucoma, a chronic and irreversible eye disease. Patients with vision loss as a result of this disease may feel like they have been 'given up on', or lost to our medical system when no further interventions can be offered to treat their eye disease. It is our intent to investigate what alternatives we can provide our patients, instead of simply saying, 'nothing more can be done'. We have learned from studies done on other chronic eye diseases, like age related macular degeneration, that low vision rehabilitation can improve visual function. What exactly is low vision? It can involve a loss of visual acuity, making activities such as reading or writing a challenge; it can involve loss of contrast sensitivity, making shapes and edges hard to discern, like those of a stair edge, or person's face. It could also involve a loss of peripheral, or side vision which is a symptom common to most glaucoma patients. Whatever the cause of low vision, doing day-to-day activities can become increasingly difficult, and many suffer from a loss of their independence and may even become depressed. Low vision rehabilitation involves helping patients to use their remaining vision in optimal, and sometimes even new, ways. This involves an assessment of a person's baseline vision, and an idea of what their needs are. Patients are then given low vision aids (such as magnifiers, telescopes, video screens which magnify images, and other tools) as well as instructions and support for adapting to living and functioning with altered vision. Although there currently exists no cure for glaucoma, and we are certainly not promising a reversal of the damage done to the eyes from this chronic disease, we do believe that these types of rehabilitation services may offer some hope and potential visual benefit to patients living with vision loss. Our hypothesis is that the use of state-of-the-art low vision aids in patients with advanced glaucomatous visual loss will provide an improvement in visual tasks and thereby an improvement in quality of life.