Interventions for infantile esotropia.

BACKGROUND

Various aspects of the clinical management of infantile esotropia (IE) are unclear - mainly, the most effective type of intervention and the age at intervention.

OBJECTIVES

The objective of this review was to assess the effectiveness of various surgical and non-surgical interventions for IE and to determine the significance of age at treatment with respect to outcome.

SEARCH STRATEGY

Trials were identified from the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials - CENTRAL (which contains the Cochrane Eyes and Vision Group Trials Register) in The Cochrane Library (Issue 3 2004), MEDLINE (1966 to July 2004), EMBASE (1980 to August 2004) and LILACS (July 2004). We manually searched the conference proceedings of the European Strabismological Association (ESA) (1975-1997, 1999-2002), International Strabismological Association (ISA) (1994) and American Academy of Paediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus meeting (AAPOS) (1995-2003). Efforts were made to contact researchers who are active in the field for information about further published or unpublished studies.

SELECTION CRITERIA

Randomised trials comparing any surgical or non-surgical intervention for infantile esotropia.

DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS

Each reviewer independently assessed study abstracts identified from the electronic and manual searches.

MAIN RESULTS

No studies were found that met our selection criteria and therefore none were included for analysis.

AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS: The main body of literature on interventions for IE are either retrospective studies or prospective cohort studies. It has not been possible through this review to resolve the controversies regarding type of surgery, non-surgical intervention and age of intervention. There is clearly a need for good quality trials to be conducted in these areas to improve the evidence base for the management of IE.