Efficacy of substance P and insulin-like growth factor-1 peptides for preventing postsurgical superficial punctate keratopathy in diabetic patients

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of IGF-1 LR3 and Substance P, published as a randomized controlled trial.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as adults, middle-aged adults, older adults and people over 80, both men and women.

Twenty-nine patients (29 eyes) with diabetes were enrolled in a double-masked, prospective, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical study.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got IGF-1 LR3 and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

Blinding on both sides kept the participants and researchers unaware of who received IGF-1 LR3.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the IGF-1 LR3 group a baseline to be compared against.

SPK scores (area, density, and combined area and density) were determined before as well as 1, 3, 7, and 14 days after surgery as main outcome measures.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Administration, Topical, Corneal Diseases, Diabetes Mellitus, Type 2, Epithelium, Corneal, Insulin-Like Growth Factor I, Oligopeptides and Ophthalmic Solutions.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of IGF-1 LR3 and Substance P.

Its findings take up roughly 5 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2009 (Japanese journal of ophthalmology), a journal based in Japan.

More context: the IGF-1 LR3 compound page and the Substance P compound page, all human trials.