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Diaspro et al. Plast Aesthet Res 2020;7:62 I http://dx.doi.org/10.20517/2347-9264.2020.143 Page 3 of 12

Figure 1. Retrieved articles: study type. RCT: Randomized Controlled Trial; CT: Controlled Trial; System. Review: Systematic Review;
Comparative: Comparative Study; CS: Case Serie; CR: Case Report

DATA DISTRIBUTION
Study type
There were eighteen prospective studies [12-21] , twenty retrospective studies [22-31] , and one that was both
[32]
retrospective and prospective ; the study type was not mentioned in twenty-seven [33-42] .
[43]
Among the published papers, there has only been one randomized controlled study on HA injections
performed to rejuvenate the tear trough area, along with two controlled trials [16,40] .

[41]
A systematic review presented with a meta-analysis has been carried out in order to evaluate treatment
for cicatricial ectropion including HA injection among non-surgical treatments.

[36]
[33]
Eight review articles have been written, the first in 2007 , then in 2010 , 2012 [38-40] and from 2016 to
2020 [44-47] , and two comparative studies were published in 2006 [13,22] .
Twenty-nine papers are case-series [11,18,27-29,48-52] , thirteen are case-reports [20,30,31,37,39,53-57] whilst the
remainder [26,34,35,40,58-66] are related to general content [Figure 1].

Follow-up duration
The mean recorded follow-up was 18.2 months [11-34] , ranging from 0.75 (3 weeks) [17,27,66] to 96 months (8 years) .
[24]
Average study population
[11]
The study of Airan and Born remains the largest, with 400 treated patients, followed by the paper edited
[51]
by Artzi et al. , which reviewed 351 patients.
Among the investigated articles which directly mentioned the study population [14-16,21,26,32,34,63,66-68] , the
[18]
[11]
average (n) was 71.37, and ranged from 3 to 400 once case reports were excluded.