Study expanded from three to five rounds: How to write this down? Update

I will suggest treating the email communication as a figure and adding a note to the figure caption. IMO a caption is overkill when the appendix title is sufficient, but it's an ok tradeoff to cover the bases.

Would still love to have other ideas to have another option or two.

(To be clear, I am not the student.)

Short question

When a study expands beyond the time communicated to participants, how does it affect reporting the results in the examples of communications with participants?

Background

The student conducted a study designed for three rounds. During Round 3 the study was expanded to four rounds; and in Round 4 it was expanded to five rounds.

All communication with participants up to Round 3 set the expectation that there would be only three rounds (i.e., letters to recruit participants, to select pilot study participants, and to give instructions for Rounds 1 and 2 in the actual study).

The appendices have copies of all of the communications. The earliest communications mention three rounds. None of the communications mentions the reason for expanding from three to four rounds or from four to five rounds.

Do you alter the early communications by inserting square brackets with corrected text as you would for a quote, such as “the 3[5]-round study”? Replace all mentions with a generic placeholder, such as “the  study”? Add an explanatory note for the reader? Or just leave everything as is? Or ...?

If it makes a difference, the paper follows APA style. The university has no standards for this situation.
Just describe what actually happened like you did to us. Also explain why this happened. There is no reason to slavishly adhere to some style that doesn’t fit special situations like yours.

In general, your thesis (and any other scientific publication) should contain everything needed to reproduce and assess the results. As the circumstances you describe are certainly relevant to this (e.g., participants may drop out of the study after prolongation), you cannot possibly leave this unmentioned.