Bulging eyes refer to the problem of proptosis and it is a medical term indicating the bulge of eyeballs or eyes caused often because of thyroid eye disease. Even the problem involves a small risk related to compression of the optical nerve (never that is responsible for transmission of signals from eyes to the brain). This further affects your eyesight permanently if you do not treat it quickly.
Do Bulging Eyes Go Away?
The problem of bulging caused from Thyroid Eye Disease goes away completely if patients undergo with the right treatment and within time. Hence, we will now discuss about common treatments available to cure the problem.
Phases of the Treatment
If an individual suffers from thyroid eye disease, the patient treatment involves varying stages. Reason for this is that condition usually progresses via two major phrases, which include
Active Phase: When symptoms take place because of eyes inflammation, like redness and dryness become prominent and patients have to bear the risk related to vision problems.
Inactive Phase: When the condition involves burnt out and most of the symptoms settle down, while you end up with a few common long-term issues, including the problem of protruding eyes. Initial active phase of the problem lasts from many months to up to two years.
Treatments of Bulging Eyes or TED at a Glance
Correcting of Thyroid Hormone Levels – If you suffer from the problem of hypothyroidism i.e. underactive thyroid gland or hyperthyroidism i.e. overactive thyroid gland, doctors will give medicines to correct the thyroid hormone levels in your blood. Treatment of thyroid problems may not necessarily improve your eye or vision related symptoms, but it prevents further problems related to abnormal levels of thyroid.
Corticosteroids: In severe cases, when eyes become painful or suffer inflammation during active phase of Thyroid Eye Disease, doctors may recommend you corticosteroid medicines. Corticosteroids act as powerful medicines to achieve control on the inflammation caused because of thyroid eye disease. In most of the cases, doctors give corticosteroids directly in the vein of a patient i.e. via intravenous injections. Irrespective of the type of corticosteroids given to patients, typical course of this treatment requires treatment for about 10 weeks to 12 weeks period. Patients may notice improvement in their conditions after one or two weeks.
Radiotherapy: Retrobulbar or orbital radiotherapy is preferable by doctors during active stage of the bulging eyes or thyroid eye disease, in case it does not become effective. Doctors may even combine radiotherapy with corticosteroids. The treatment uses X-rays or any other similar type of high-energy radiations for destroying cells. Low radiation doses are useful on muscles and tissues in the eye socket to avoid swelling problems.
During the treatment, patients lie down and doctors place a special shell on the head to keep it in still position. In addition, machine direct the radiation beams in a careful manner at the area that requires treatment. Radiotherapy procedure takes place on outpatient basis, because of which you do not have to stay in the hospital for the whole night. Treatment involves 10 different sessions for a period of two weeks.
Surgery to Cure Bulging Eyes
Surgery acts as an effective treatment to cure bulging eyes in case patients have persistent or severe symptoms. Doctors mainly perform three major forms of surgery to treat patients with bulging eyes, which are-
In this surgery, a surgeon removes relatively small amount of bone from the eye socket/sockets of the patient.
Eyelid Surgery: Surgeons carry out eyelid surgery procedure to bring improvements in the position, appearance or closure of the patients’ eyelids.
Eye Muscles Surgery: In case of eye muscles surgery, surgeons perform surgery on the patients’ eye muscles to bring proper alignment of the eyes and reduce the problem of double vision.
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