Estelle lives with severe glaucoma and she arranged for her daughter Megan to take a test. This test was to find her ‘risk score’ for glaucoma. It predicts if she might develop the disease in her lifetime.
“Neither of my girls have shown any signs of glaucoma” says Estelle. “And no one else in my family has it…I’ve sort of felt that my girls will probably be fine and won’t get it. But in actual fact, it sounds like Megan could.”
Estelle explains that the test results gave a score and showed a graph. “The left-hand side starts in a light colour, and it ends up red on the right-hand side. And it plotted her on that. She was at the beginning of the red”.
As the score represents your likelihood over your whole lifetime, Megan still has a few more years till glaucoma is a concern. Megan’s not too worried She has total faith in her eye specialist who can leverage the risk score to treat her.
For Estelle’s family, the score reminds them to keep up with their regular eye health checks. “It just means everybody will be a little bit more cautious.”
“If someone in the family’s got glaucoma, and they’re worried about it, I would definitely recommend them getting the test” says Estelle. “And if they’re anxious about losing their sight or they think there’s something wrong.”