Authors' reply.

Dear Sir,

We thank the authors for their interest in our article[1] and appreciate their comments.

Briefly, all subjects underwent detailed physical examination in our study. Our exclusion criteria included history of diabetes, glaucoma, blood dyscrasias, renal failure, hepatic disorders, malignancy, and history of drug use (non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs, anti-coagulant medications, and oral contraceptives). Patients with branched retinal vein occlusion (BRVO) who had a history of vasculitis were also excluded from the study. We found that mean platelet volume (MPV) is significantly higher in hypertensive patients with BRVO than control group (hypertensive patients without BRVO). We, therefore, recommended the potential use of MPV as a prognostic biomarker in patients with BRVO.

BRVO is a retinal vascular disease entity with an incidence of 0.5% to 1.2%.[2] Limited number of patients in our study may be due to our exclusion criteria. After detailed physical examination, patients with suspected systemic illnesses excluded from the study, except systemic hypertension. Moreover, we excluded BRVO patients with morbid obesity (Body mass index ≥ 35 kg/m2). Since most of the patients with BRVO are older and coincidence of systemic diseases is quite common in these individuals, we thought that 40 patients who provided our inclusion criteria could not be underestimated for a simple preliminary study. However, further studies with a larger sample are necessary to confirm our preliminary findings. In addition to this, other inflammatory markers in routine hemogram test including red cell distribution width, neutrophil lymphocyte ratio, plateletcrit, and platelet lymphocyte ratio should be tested in future studies in patients with BRVO.