If you hadn’t marked it on your calendar, Glaucoma Awareness Month just drew to a close at the end of January. 

While the month is over, the effort to raise awareness about the group of eye diseases that affects around 3 million Americans is still ongoing. 

January also marked the second time that Bausch + Lomb has helped promote Glaucoma Awareness Month. This time, the eye care company did it through a partnership with the Glaucoma Research Foundation, making educational resources available to the public and matching donations to the organization to help efforts to find a cure. 

The heart of the educational portion of the Screen, Protect, Cure campaign is Bausch + Lomb’s sponsorship of the foundation’s website and the distribution of glaucoma awareness posters. 

“Glaucoma is the leading cause of irreversible blindness,” Christina Ackermann, president of ophthalmic pharmaceuticals at Bausch + Lomb says. “But if patients go to doctors early enough and get treated, it’s possible to slow down and prevent vision loss. The Screen, Protect, Cure campaign focuses on educating the public on glaucoma, promoting eye care screening and encouraging people to go to the website and look at the Glaucoma Research Foundation’s materials.”

The program is designed to reach as many people as possible by inciting action, empowerment through education and just creating awareness, Ackermann adds. As a result of the campaign’s efforts, 16,900 people visited the foundation’s landing page in January, and they spent an average of 3.22 minutes on the website. 

Dr. Terri Pickering, a glaucoma specialist at the Glaucoma Center of San Francisco and a clinical instructor at California Pacific Medical Center who sits on the board of directors of the Glaucoma Research Foundation, explains some of the common misconceptions around the disease. 

“Part of the problem is that it is typically asymptomatic,” she says. “It is possible to have glaucoma and not realize it, which is what makes these campaigns so important. Talk to your family, look at your risk factors and get screened.”

In addition, Pickering says the perception that glaucoma only impacts the elderly may lead some not to get screened when there is still time to slow the disease’s progress. 

“A lot of folks say, well, this is something that older people get. The problem is that they tend to be diagnosed at an older age, but they may be developing it at a younger age,” Pickering notes. “We recommend that patients start getting screened once they reach 60. Nowadays, that is not that old, but if you’re African American, you should actually start being screened once you hit 40 because it does tend to present earlier in our community.”

Pickering describes the 2023 campaign as reinforcing the foundation of the partnership between Bausch + Lomb and the Glaucoma Research Foundation that began with 2022’s Glaucoma Awareness Month. 

“We’re doing more outreach, more partnering with media and more interviews, and we have seen great growth as we try to expand our outreach and reach as many people as possible,” she says.

Also new to this year’s effort are awareness posters being distributed to doctor’s offices. “The posters are new and that’s exciting,” she adds. “It’s always nice to have a visual with a simple message.”

Still, Pickering wants to make sure that the third part of the campaign name, “cure,” is not overlooked. Bausch + Lomb’s matching commitment may have a modest cap of $20,000 but that is important financial support for the foundation’s efforts that also helps to highlight research efforts

“The Glaucoma Research Foundation is unique because we bring together separate researchers, in separate universities and in separate labs, in different parts of the country, and say to them, collaborate and answer this question,” she says. “That is the way forward to find answers quickly.”

For a January 2024 article about Bausch + Lomb’s Faces of Glaucoma campaign, click here.