Current Evidence Regarding Treatment Modalities for the Management of Patients With Dry Eye Disease
abstract
This abstract is available on the publisher's site.
Access this abstract nowAlthough the ultimate goal of dry eye disease (DED) management is to restore the ocular surface and tear film homeostasis and address any accompanying symptoms, addressing this is not an easy task. Despite the wide range of current treatment modalities targeting multiple aspects of DED, the available DED management literature is quite heterogeneous, rendering evaluation or comparison of treatment outcomes hard or almost impossible. There is still a shortage of well-designed, large-scale, nonsponsored, randomized, controlled trials (RCTs) evaluating long-term safety and efficacy of many targeted therapies individually or used in combination, in the treatment of identified subgroups of patients with DED. This review focuses on the treatment modalities in DED management and aims to reveal the current evidence available as deduced from the outcomes of RCTs.
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Update on Dry Eye Disease Treatment: Evidence From Randomized Controlled Trials
Eye Contact Lens 2023 Sep 20;[EPub Ahead of Print], OO Ucakhan, T Celik-Buyuktepe, L Yang, B Wogu, PA AsbellFrom MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
This exhaustive review of the PubMed database will be useful, particularly for researchers and authors seeking a centralized literature source of published randomized controlled trials (RCTs) evaluating treatments for dry eye disease. It is worth noting the authors' comment that: "When evaluating results from RCTs, it is also critical to determine if changes from baseline in signs/symptoms are clinically significant, not just statistically significant. Furthermore, careful comparison of the active treatment group with the placebo/vehicle group is important to assess the clinical significance of changes between the groups because, often, in dry eye disease RCTs, all patients improve, regardless of whether they are in the active or in the placebo group, with little or no difference in improvement between the groups." This idea of differentiating between statistical significance and clinical significance aligns with the argument in the article by Al-Thawabieh et al regarding RCTs.1
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