Figure 1.
The major reasons for not meeting the inclusion criteria were pregnancy (8) and being on a treatment with doxycycline incompatible drugs (6). Many patients were lost to follow-up probably due to the high number of immigrants, a very mobile population, that were enrolled in the trial. Six patients had to suspend treatment due to mild adverse events. Several patients had more than one pterygium, so the total number of pterygia is also included.
Table 1.
Baseline demographic and clinical characteristics of the patients enrolled in the trial.
Figure 2.
Photographs of the eye of patient number 20 (male, 61 year-old, Caucasian) before (A) and after (B) the treatment with doxycycline for 30 days.
A clear reduction of the lesion's size can be appreciated, from 5.44 mm2 to 3.95 mm2.
Table 2.
Statistically significant variables in the backward logistic regression model based on likelihood ratio.
Figure 3.
Correlation plot between patient's age (abscises) and relative response to treatment (ordinates) for patients that received either placebo (green circles) or doxycycline (red squares).
The green and red lines represent the correlation slope for each set. There is a significant correlation for doxycycline treatment (Spearman's r = −0.4783, 95% CI −0.7025 to −0.1678, p = 0.003). Relative change in surface is the quotient between the size of the lesion in the second visit divided by the size in the first visit.
Figure 4.
Waterfall representation of the relative changes in pterygium surface for all intention-to-treat patients treated with placebo (A, C) or with doxycycline (B, D), according to race.
Each bar represents an individual pterygium. To comply with waterfall representation conventions, values are represented as relative change in surface minus 1, so that positive values represent lesion growth and negative values represent lesion reduction.