What Causes Glaucoma?

There are primary and secondary causes of glaucoma:

·  Primary glaucoma involves a problem in the way that the eyeball developed. Cases of primary glaucoma generally occur in breeds that are genetically predisposed to suffering from the condition, particularly breeds with bulging eyes or large eyes proportional to the skull.

 

·  Primary glaucoma is much more common in dogs than in cats.

·  Secondary glaucoma encompasses many causes, including inflammation that scars the eye and blocks fluid drainage; tumors that fill up the drainage pathway; an accident to the eye that causes it to fill with blood, that blocks and scars the drainage pathway; and lens luxation, a shift in the lens that can block a drainage pathway.

Inflammation inside the eye has many causes. In dogs, they include infectious diseases such as fungal disease and tick-transmitted disease and cataracts.

For cats, chronic anterior uveitis, an inflammation of the front of the eye, often leads to glaucoma.

With glaucoma, one or both eyes can eventually be affected depending on the cause of inflammation.