Purpose: To assess the additive effect of postoperative Bevacizumab eye drops to MMC augmented bare sclera in cases of primary pterygium concerning the safety and recurrence rate.
Patients and methods:This prospective randomized controlled study included 20 patients with bilateral primary pterygium. The right eye of each patient was treated by simple pterygium excision with bare sclera and MMC application followed by artificial tear eye drops for 4 weeks postoperative as placebo (group I included 20 eyes) and served as the control group. The left eye of each patient was treated by simple excision with bare sclera and MMC followed by topical Bevacizumab eye drops for 4 weeks postoperative (group II included 20 eyes). Both eyes were operated upon in the same session. All subjects were examined on days 1, 7,14 and 30 and monthly for year to record any vascularization measured in mm or recurrence of pterygium measured horizontally from the limbus to its apex in the cornea.Results: After 12 months of follow up, 3 eyes (15%) with recurrence were seen in group I which was not significantly different from group II with 2 eyes (10%). No corneal neovascularization in group II except in 7 eyes of which only 1-2 mm neovessels growth in 5 eyes and one eye more than 3mm and another eye 2-3 mm however in group I no vascularization in only 5 eyes with more than 3 mm neovessels in 3 eyes, 5 eyes with neovessels 2-3 mm and 7 eyes with 1-2 mm neovessels. Total P-Value concerning the presence and absence of vascularization between the two groups was 0.000805 which was highly significant.
Conclusion:Our study concluded that recurrence was not affected by the topical Bevacizumab with no statistically significant difference between the two groups; however, a statistically significant difference existed in the level of corneal neovascularization between the two groups suggesting that regression of neovessels is not a guarantee against recurrence of pterygium.
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Patients and MethodsThis prospective randomized controlled study included 20 patients with bilateral primary pterygium. Written consent was obtained from the patients and included an explanation of the study and agreement to have a photo of the eye area only taken. This study work follows the recommendations of the Ethics Committee of Zagazig university (ZU-IRB) which conforms to the provisions of the Declaration of Helsinki in 1995 (as revised in Edinburgh 2000). The sample size was calculated to be 40 eyes, the calculation was done using Epi-Info (Epidemiological Information Package) software version 6.1. The patients were selected from the patients attending the outpatient clinic of ophthalmology department of Zagazig University Hospital during the period from November 2013 to December 2014.To ensure matching between the study groups, patients with bilateral pterygia only were included in the study and the right eye was randomly selected to be treated with MMC only while the left eye was randomly selected to be treated with both MMC and Bevacizumab. The right ...