The African Descent and Glaucoma Evaluation Study

ADAGES is the first prospectively designed multi-center, longitudinal study to follow a well-characterized cohort of glaucoma patients of African descent on a variety of measures of visual function, optic nerve structure, risk assessment, and clinical results. It is sponsored by the National Eye Institute of NIH. UAB Ophthalmology is one of three national clinical centers for ADAGES (Christopher Girkin MD, Principal Investigator). ADAGES is designed to impact key areas of glaucoma vision research including disease prevention, detection, diagnosis, methods for longitudinal assessment and management, treatment effect, and quality of life.

The data gleaned from ADAGES will improve our ability to detect and predict glaucomatous damage and to develop technology- and software-based paradigms to estimate lifetime risk of blindness for individual persons. ADAGES will identify the factors that account for differences in glaucoma onset and rate of progression found between individuals of African descent and those of European descent and to determine whether accounting for these differences can be used to optimize algorithms for detection of glaucoma, for monitoring progression, and for evaluating the effectiveness of therapies.