BACKGROUNDThe recurrence of pterygium after surgery is high. A variety of adjunctive treatment approaches have been developed to improve the clinical efficacy and many related articles have been published. This study aimed to determine the risk for postoperative pterygium recurrence comparing autologous conjunctival transplantation (ACT) versus mitomycin C (MMC).

METHODSRelevant literature published until December 2010 in Medline, Embase, Cochrane, Cochrane library, Science Citation Index, and Google Scholar were searched. Qualified random clinical trial (RCT) studies on the comparison of recurrence rate of pterygium after ACT and MMC treatment were included in this study.

RESULTSEight RCTs with 663 eyes entered the final analysis. The recurrent rate of pterygium was 8.7% (30/343) for ACT and 18.75% (60/320) for MMC. Using fixed-effect meta analysis, we found that the recurrence was significantly lower after ACT than MMC treatment (odds ratio (OR) = 0.40, 95% confidence index (CI), 0.25 - 0.63, P < 0.0001). In sensitivity analyses, we employed random-effects model and excluded studies of low quality or studies in which MMC was administrated after the operation. All the sensitivity analyses confirmed that ACT led to lower recurrence rates than MMC. Sub-group analysis revealed that the recurrence rate was 20.2% (20/99) and 27.65% (26/94) for conjunctival autograft (CA) and MMC respectively, and no significant difference in the recurrence rate was detected (OR = 0.65, 95%CI 0.33 - 1.28, P = 0.22). However, we found that conjunctival limbal autograft (CLA) had lower recurrence rate than MMC (OR = 0.26, 95%CI 0.14 - 0.48, P = 0.0001).

CONCLUSIONCLA has better therapy efficacy against the recurrence of pterygium than MMC.