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The first sign of injury in glaucoma occurs in the brain, not the eye as previously thought.

“If you followed the disease long enough, eventually the optic nerve, then the retina, show signs of degeneration,” explains David Calkins, associate professor of ophthalmology at Vanderbilt University. “So the degeneration works in reverse order. It starts in the brain and works its way back to the retina so that in the very latest stages of the disease, the earliest structures, the ones nearest the eye, are the last to go.”

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Photo credit: National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health