Study leader Jae Kang, MSc, an assistant professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, and team followed nearly 64,000 participants in the Nurses’ Health Study from 1984 to 2012, and more than 41,000 participants in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study from 1986 to 2014. The men and women were all 40 or older, and none of them had glaucoma at the start of the study. They also had eye exams every two years.
Investigators divided the participants into five groups, from the highest level of leafy green vegetable consumption to the lowest.
Here are four key points:
1. Over the 25-year follow up, almost 1,500 people developed glaucoma.
2. Those who ate the most leafy greens averaged about 1.5 servings a day. Those who were in the group who ate the least ate about a serving every three days.
3. Dr. Kang believes there is an impairment of blood flow to the optic nerve in glaucoma, and an important factor that regulates blood flow to the eye is a substance called nitric oxide. Nitrates are contained in green leafy vegetables.
4. Although the study found an association between eating more leafy greens and a lower risk of glaucoma, it didn’t prove cause-and-effect.
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