Glaucoma Risk: Stay Away From This Diet To Protect Your Eyes As You Age

Making a simple modification to the diet can help lower glaucoma risk.

Glaucoma is a health problem that confronts people as they age. While many believe the condition is inescapable, new research shows making some changes to the diet can help minimize the risk.

Researchers found that a low-carbohydrate diet can help protect against the vision-impairing disease. Researchers examined data from 185,000 male health professionals and female nurses between 40 and 75 years old, who were part of three large studies conducted from 1976 to 2017 in the United States, according to US News and World Reports.

The researchers found that sticking to a diet high in vegetable fat and protein and low in carbohydrates helps lower the risk of primary open-angle glaucoma, or POAG, with premature paracentral visual loss by around 20%. The study was recently published online in the journal Eye.

Glaucoma is one of the main causes of blindness in the U.S. and POAG is its most common form. Patients sometimes have a few or no symptoms until the disease is in an advanced stage. At this time, they may slowly lose their peripheral vision.

"A diet high in vegetable fats and proteins and low in carbohydrates helps generate metabolites that are beneficial for the mitochondrion-rich optic nerve head, which is the damaged location in POAG," said Dr. Louis Pasquale, the co-corresponding author of the study, in a news release.

"It's important to note that a low-carbohydrate diet won't stop glaucoma progression if you already have it, but it may be a means to preventing glaucoma in high-risk groups," Dr. Pasquale, who is also the ophthalmology research deputy chair at Mount Sinai Health System, NYC, explained. He added that if more patients, particularly those belonging to the high-risk categories and those with a family history of the disease, observed this diet, the cases of vision loss may be fewer.

Dr. Pasquale said their study is just observational and more work needs to be done, as this is the first research that examines dietary patterns on POAG. "The next step is to use artificial intelligence to objectively quantify the paracentral visual loss in our glaucoma cases and repeat the analysis," he added.

Emphasizing the importance of identifying patients with the genetic makeup of primary open-angle glaucoma, who may gain a lot from a low-carbohydrate diet, he said, "This dietary pattern may be protective only in people with a certain genetic makeup," Dr. Pasquale ended.