Redefining clinical outcomes and endpoints in glaucoma

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Increasing life expectancy and ageing populations across the world are causing the number of glaucoma patients to rise dramatically. With longer lifespans also comes the need to improve the timeframe and accuracy with which we can diagnose, monitor and treat patients, ensuring longevity of vision contributes to a meaningful quality of life. Current markers used in glaucoma practice are in many cases suboptimal in their ability to accurately identify glaucomatous damage in time to prevent irreversible optic neuropathy.

Areas covered: This review summarises the important properties of successful biomarkers and surrogates, and relates this to how intraocular pressure, visual field testing, and imaging have been refined to improve early diagnosis and progression analysis of glaucoma patients. Secondly, we discuss newer concepts in imaging, genetics, and quality of life measures which may provide biomarkers and surrogate endpoints with which to develop novel treatments in the future.

Expert commentary: We summarise the key relevant points in glaucoma research, and the current techniques being trialled that are most likely to lead to valuable biomarkers for the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Glaucoma
• biomarkers
• endpoints
• surrogate marker
• neurodegeneration

Declaration of interest

M F Cordeiro is a named co-inventor on granted patent EP 2231199B1 and published patent WO 2,011,055,121 A1 owned by Universtiy College London and related to DARC technology. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed. Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was not funded