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Blepharitis - Evidence
Evidence on general treatments for blepharitis
Treatments for chronic blepharitis have not been well studied and are supported by limited, weak, and indirect evidence from clinical trials. Use of these treatments is thus mainly based on clinical experience and expert opinion.
- CKS found no relevant randomized placebo-controlled trials of treatments (lid hygiene, topical drug treatments, oral tetracycline) for blepharitis:
- Evidence of effectiveness comes from case series and small randomized controlled trials (RCTs) comparing two or more treatments. Several of the RCTs were too small to yield useful evidence on the drugs compared, but they did enable before-and-after comparisons. Such data is equivalent to evidence from a case-series study, although the titles and abstracts can lead the reader to assess the evidence as coming from RCTs.
- Two of the RCTs are not reviewed here because they studied agents that are unlikely to be used in UK primary care.
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