“What is a visual field test?”

A visual field test maps out your field of view, specifically for glaucoma it will measure your peripheral vision. During the test, you respond to the visual stimuli while focusing on a central point. This test will be repeated over time to help determine whether the disease is progressing.

A visual field tests how sensitive your eyes are to different levels of light stimulation at different points around a persons vision. As glaucoma progresses it tends to reduce the sensitivity of a patients eyes in the peripheral vision areas. A visual field test is a way to monitor if glaucoma is worsening or staying stable.

In order to determine if one has glaucoma, several factors must be considered. These include age, medical history, medications, eye history including a family eye history (any glaucoma in the family?), race, refractive status (nearsightedness or farsightedness) corneal thickness, eye pressures, optic nerve status and optic nerve health, actual type of glaucoma (there are many), and visual field evaluation. The visual field is what you actually see, above and below, and side to side. By doing a specific visual field test, objects or lights are shown to a patient one eye at time in order to determine if there is a visual field problem or not (are you seeing what you should be seeing or not). This test is also done regularly for glaucoma patients in order to be certain that any medications or surgery is working and that your visual fields are either staying the same which is preferred, as opposed to the visual fields getting worse. If there are changes in a visual field test, your eye doctor may consider new or additional eye medications or eye surgery if this is an appropriate treatment. If your eye pressures are too high for your optic nerves to withstand, this pressure can damage the optic nerves and cause vision reduction, vision loss, and/or visual field losses. I hope this helps. Good luck and best wishes.

This test measures the peripheral vision of both eyes. If you have glaucoma, this is what is damaged by the disease, Glaucoma. The way that it tests the peripheral vision is that you cover one eye, and look straight ahead with the eye that is not covered. Lights are then produced in a random pattern to see at level you can see the lights. The lights vary in brightness. A Technician usually administers this test in a darken room, which a machine that many times resembles a large bowl.
If you have glaucoma areas will be found that are loosing sensitivity at first and can progress to a complete loss of the vision to the side.

Used mostly for glaucoma to check peripheral vision