Surgical Outcomes in Patients with Intermittent Exotropia with Siblings Who Underwent Surgery by the Same Surgeon

Purpose: We evaluated surgical outcomes in pediatric patients with intermittent exotropia with and without a family history of exotropia surgery performed by the same surgeon.Methods: We conducted a retrospective review of the medical records of pediatric patients aged ≤ 18 years who underwent surgery for intermittent exotropia between September 2015 and December 2021. We compared surgical outcomes between patients with and without a family history of exotropia surgery performed using 1:1 propensity score matching. A successful surgical outcome was defined as achieving alignment between an exodeviation of 10 prism diopters (PD) and an esodeviation of 4 PD.Results: This study included 60 patients with a family history of exotropia surgery and 60 matched controls with no such history. Notably, the log-rank test revealed no significant differences in surgical outcomes between the two groups (p = 0.622). Furthermore, clinical characteristics, including the onset of exotropia, degree of ocular deviation, and age at surgery, were similar between first- and second-born siblings. Furthermore, no significant differences were observed in surgical outcomes between the two groups (p= 0.540).Conclusions: Patients with a family history of exotropia surgery do not exhibit significantly different surgical outcomes compared to those with no such history. In addition, no significant differences were observed in surgical outcomes between the first- and second-born siblings.