THC and CBD for Glaucoma

Glaucoma is when your eyes have too much pressure inside, which can hurt the nerve that helps you see. The most common type, open-angle glaucoma, gets worse over time and can be hard to treat. As more people learn about medical marijuana, they wonder if THC or CBD oil might help with this eye problem.

A few studies looked at how marijuana affects eye pressure. They found that THC, not CBD, can lower the pressure for a short time. But this effect doesn't last long enough to make it a good treatment. Also, marijuana can be hard to quit once you start using it. More research shows that CBD might increase eye pressure a little bit. Marijuana can also reduce blood flow in the eye. Both of these things could make the seeing nerve even worse.

What Is Glaucoma?

Glaucoma is a common eye problem that often affects older people. It's the main reason why older adults lose their sight. Glaucoma slowly damages the nerve that connects your eyes to your brain. At first, it makes it harder to see things at the edges of your vision. If not treated, it can make you completely blind.

Cause

The main reason for glaucoma is too much pressure inside your eye. Your eye is filled with fluid. If this fluid can't drain properly, or if high blood pressure pushes on the blood vessels around your eyes, the pressure inside your eye goes up. This extra pressure pushes on the back of your eye, cutting off blood flow and hurting the seeing nerve.

Types of Glaucoma

There are three main kinds of glaucoma. Each one needs to be treated a bit differently.

Chronic Glaucoma

This is the most common type. It's also called primary open-angle glaucoma. It happens slowly over time. The part of your eye that drains fluid stops working well, so fluid builds up. This slowly increases the pressure in your eye. Because it happens slowly, it's easy to miss the signs. You might start to lose bits of your vision or not see things at the edges as well. Many people don't notice until they can only see straight ahead, like looking through a tunnel.

Acute or Angle-Closure Glaucoma

This type happens suddenly when eye pressure goes up very quickly. It's often linked to a big spike in blood pressure that hurts the eye's drainage system right away. This kind of glaucoma can make you blind very fast and needs emergency treatment. Watch out for these signs:

• Really bad headaches, especially in your forehead or behind your eyes.
• Eye pain
• Feeling sick to your stomach or throwing up
• Seeing rainbows or rings around lights
• Not being able to handle bright light

Normal-Tension Glaucoma

In this type, the seeing nerve gets damaged even though the pressure in the eye seems normal. We're not sure why this happens. Some eye doctors think a small blood clot might stop blood from flowing around the seeing nerve, but we don't know for sure.

Does Marijuana Help with Glaucoma?

Knowing how glaucoma works helps us understand how weed might affect it. Scientists found that marijuana can quickly lower eye pressure. This gave some relief to people with open-angle glaucoma and could buy time for those with acute glaucoma. But the effects didn't last long – usually only about three hours.

How Does Weed Affect Glaucoma?

Now we know that marijuana is a complicated plant with nearly 400 different parts. We don't know everything about all these parts, and some of them even work against each other. Most medical uses of marijuana focus on two main ingredients: THC and CBD. There are lots of spots around your eye that can "feel" these ingredients and be affected by them.

Both THC and CBD seem to protect nerves and can help with worry, pain, and throwing up. But most of the effects we think of as "being high" (like forgetting things, seeing things that aren't there, feeling like time is weird, or getting hungry) come from THC. CBD seems better for stopping seizures and helping with worry, and it doesn't make you hungry. That's why CBD oil, gummies, candy drops, and even syrups are becoming more popular where they're legal. But unfortunately, CBD doesn't help lower eye pressure – the main thing that helps with glaucoma. Using CBD might even increase pressure in the eyes instead of lowering it.