DropDownList AppendDataBoundItems (first item to be blank and no duplicates)

I have a DropDownList inside an UpdatePanel that is populated on postback from a SqlDataSource. It has a parameter which is another control. I sometimes need multiple postbacks, but what happens is that each time the update panel refreshes, items are added to the DropDownList. So the DropDownList ends up having data that is incorrect, or repeated data.

Using pandas .append within for loop

I am appending rows to a pandas DataFrame within a for loop, but at the end the dataframe is always empty. I don’t want to add the rows to an array and then call the DataFrame constructer, because my actual for loop handles lots of data. I also tried pd.concat without success. Could anyone highlight what I am missing to make the append statement work? Here’s a dummy example: