Unilateral medial rectus muscle recession combined lateral rectus muscle marginal myotomy for the treatment of Duane's retraction syndrome: A promising surgical procedure

BACKGROUND: Duane's retraction syndrome is a congenital eye movement anomaly with narrowing of the palpebral fissure and globe retraction on attempted adduction. There are several surgical approaches to treat the narrowing of the palpebral fissure. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the efficacy of unilateral medial rectus recession (MRR) muscle combined lateral rectus (LR) muscle marginal myotomy (MM) with unilateral MRR alone in the management of narrowing of the palpebral fissure of patients with Type 1 Duane's retraction syndrome (DRS). MATERIALS AND METHODS: Twenty-eight patients with unilateral DRS Type 1 were randomly divided into two groups (14 eyes of 14 patients in each group). Age ≥5 years with DRS Type 1 with <20 prism diopters in primary position who were candidates for surgery were consecutively enrolled in this randomized controlled trial. Patients were divided into treatment groups to receive unilateral MR recession with simultaneous MM group or with unilateral MR recession alone. The amount of deviation in primary position, abnormal head position, palpebral fissure width (PFW), and up/down shoot was evaluated before and 3 months after the surgery. This study was registered at the Iranian Registry of Clinical Trials under the registration code IRCT20131229015975N3. RESULTS: PFW increased within MRR/MM group at the end of the study (8.86 ± 1.51) compared with the baseline (7.79 ± 1.48) (P < 0.001). In contrast, in the MRR/MM group, PFW did not increase statistically significantly within the MRR group at the end of the study (8.14 ± 1.35) compared with the baseline (8.07 ± 1.38) (P = 0.67). Mean ± standard deviation of PFW (mm) in MRR/MM group after surgery (8.86 ± 1.51) was statistically significantly higher than that in the MRR group (8.14 ± 1.35), (P = 0.002). CONCLUSION: The results of our study demonstrate PFW significantly increased after unilateral MRR muscle combined LR muscle MM.