At Academy 2011 Boston, the Optometric Glaucoma Society (OGS) reached a critical milestone: The group held its 10th annual meeting.

To celebrate this achievement, OGS president John Flanagan, Ph.D., M.C.Optom., and executive vice president Murray Fingeret, O.D., invited several special guest lecturers, including this year’s honoree, Jeffrey Liebmann, M.D. “Dr. Liebmann is truly deserving of recognition as one of the world’s leading glaucoma specialists,” Dr. Flanagan said. “His clinical excellence and extraordinary academic contributions made him an ideal guest to help us celebrate our 10th anniversary.”

During his lecture on disc hemorrhages, Dr. Liebmann noted, “If I could do only one test for glaucoma, it wouldn’t’ be intraocular pressure. I would look at the optic disc for disc hemorrhages. We need to evaluate the optic nerve every time we see the patient.”

Several other thought leaders in glaucoma research also lectured at this year’s OGS meeting, including Douglass R. Anderson, M.D., Chris A. Johnson, Ph.D., and Louis Pasquale, M.D.

In his lecture “Blood Flow Regulation in the Optic Nerve Head,” Dr. Anderson said, “I view glaucoma as fundamentally intermittent episodes of ischemia, so it’s only during those critical times that we need to maintain perfusion,”

Then, in his lecture, “Perimetry and Visual Field Testing: A Historical Overview of My Personal Experiences,” Dr. Johnson suggested that, although perimetry has been the primary method of visual field evaluation for many decades, there’s still a lot of room for improvement.

Later, Dr. Pasquale noted that, while studies are ongoing, clinicians can help prevent exfoliation syndrome right now by advising patients to wear sunglasses and avoid certain sunny environments in his lecture “Exfoliation Syndrome: Will We Prevent This Condition Someday?”