Advances in methods to assess progression of glaucomatous visual impairment

Glaucoma is a group of ocular diseases characterized by structural damage to the optic nerve, and the goal of its clinical management is to slow disease progression and preserve the physiological need for visual function.Methods to assess glaucoma disease progression include assessment of structural damage and assessment of visual function damage.As glaucomatous disease progresses, some of the indicators used to assess structural damage have a floor effect when retinal ganglion cells die in large numbers.Therefore, visual function assessment has become the main modality to monitor the progression of mid- to late-stage glaucoma.This article reviews the visual function assessment methods, applications, and recent advances from four aspects, namely, visual field examination, visual electrophysiology examination, contrast sensitivity, and comprehensive visual function assessment, and analyzes their characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages in assessing the progression of visual function damage in glaucoma.

Glaucoma; Visual impairment; Evaluation of disease progression; Visual field; Electrophysiology