A prospective randomized treatment study comparing three treatment options for chalazia: triamcinolone acetonide injections, incision and curettage and treatment with hot compresses

摘要

We thank Brown et al. for their interest in our study. We would firstly like to point out that in our paper, we did acknowledge its limitations as a result of relying on patients' self-assessment and the reduced validity of a delayed pain survey.An uncomplicated chalazion is not a sight-threatening condition and under routine circumstances at our Eye Unit, patients are not followed up after treatment. Therefore, our rationale for following patients up with a telephone call was that clinical observation to ascertain whether 'absolute clearance' of chalazia had been achieved was not necessary, as long as patients themselves were satisfied that their chalazia had resolved.The results of our paper are consistent with current literature which suggests that steroid injections achieve a lower resolution rate than incision and curettage. However, our study did yield a higher overall resolution rate with steroid injections than shown in previous studies and a much lower need for a second steroid injection than previously recorded. We hypothesize that this unexpected outcome may be related to the fact that we asked all patients to apply 5 min of digital massage over the chalazion at least three times daily for 1 week following the injection.Whereas there are reported cases of globe perforation secondary to transcutaneous eyelid injections without the use of a lid clamp, the steroid injections in our study were administered transconjunctivally, therefore, this risk was minimized and the use of a lid clamp was not necessary.