A topical erythromycin preparation and oral tetracycline for the treatment of perioral dermatitis: a placebo-controlled trial

Critical Appraisal of Reports on the Treatment of Perioral Dermatitis

“…Piérard because of uncertain diagnosis and 1 POD paper [18] listed twice) amounting to 25/29 articles, respectively. Four papers had to be added to the 25 Medline articles because they were listed in Embase [6,7,8, 27] or in the Cochrane Central [6, 27], but not in Medline, amounting to 29 databank papers. Another article [21] was extracted from the cohort of 183 articles mentioned above.…”

“…In the Cochrane Central, only 6 out of 8 articles referred to treatment of POD [[5, 6, 11, 12, 27, 28]. For Medline/Embase, the selection process was as follows: from 125/296 articles, 36/160 articles were excluded in a first step (28/105 with diagnoses other than POD, 8/42 dealing with corticosteroids, 0/13 dealing with therapeutics in general) amounting to 89/136 papers; excluded were 64/107 additional articles (36/51 referring to non-therapeutic aspects of POD, 5/12 describing patients with granulomatous POD, 16/33 with languages other than English or German, 7/9 small series and case reports of POD, 0/2 other publications: a paper by A.F.…”

“…Up to February 2004, sources for this study were Medline (1964–2004), Embase (1966–2004), the Central Register of Controlled Clinical Trials (Central) of the Cochrane Library (1971–2004) and the 526 references of 3 textbook articles [1,2,3], the 30 papers cited in this study [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33] and 2 recent reviews [34, 35]. In Medline and Embase, 125 out of 215 and 296 out of 454 articles, respectively, were found referring to ‘perioral (and) dermatitis and therapy’.…”

“…Some dermatologists recommend no therapy [1, 4]. The discontinuation of topical corticosteroids and cosmetics is said to be important [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. However, several problems are encountered.…”

“…Since the rationale of oral therapy is doubtful, it might be preferable to use effective topical regimens instead of oral tetracycline. Yet, the efficacy of a topical regimen has not been proven apart from one possible exception [6]. Moreover, the nature and indication of accompanying treatment need clarification.…”