Manu Kurian Baby1, Prathibha K Muthu2, Priscilla Johnson1, Senthil Kannan3. 1. Department of Pulmonology, Sri Ramachandra University, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. 2. Department of Physiology, Konaseema Institute of Medical Sciences, Amalapuram, Andhra Pradesh, India E-mail: muthuprathi@gmail.com. 3. Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Sri Ramachandra University, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India.
Sir,Thanks for sharing the letter to editor with us.[1] We appreciate the efforts of the author in bringing out the key remarks regarding our article published in January 2014 issue of Lung India.[2] We would like to answer the queries as follows:We do agree with the author on the study conducted by Proença et al. evaluating immediate and short term effects of smoking on nasal mucociliary clearance (NMC) in smokers.[3] However, our objective was to just evaluate the NMC of smokers and non smokers. It was not planned to study the effect of the last episode of smoking on NMC. Since we wanted to maintain uniformity in the assessment of NMC amongst all the smokers, we placed criteria that the study subjects should refrain from smoking from 10 pm (previous night) to 9 am (next day), after which the test was performed. Subjects who had defaulted were excluded from the study. We would definitely consider studying the short term and >8 h influence of smoking in our future studies in similar regard. We appreciate the suggestion and interest shown in the study methodologyThanks for the suggestion again. We did consider studying the influence of age. Following data entry, when we tried grouping the smokers and non smokers based on their age, they fell under 2 categories of 25-30 years and 35-40 years. We personally felt that the number of participants in each sub group was too small to arrive at conclusions. However, we noticed that was no statistical significance in mean NMC between these two age groups. But, we feel that they are not very different with regard to age and it does not make much sense in looking for a difference between them. However, in future, we would plan to study the influence of age on NMC in smokers and non smokersIn future, we have plans to do a similar study considering the number of cigarettes per day. Infact, our study did not have anyone who smoked Beedis and so we were not able to find an association based on the type of tobacco smoked.We, once again thank the author for having taken the pains to provide us suggestions for conducting further studies on this interesting subject in the future. We also thank the editor for giving us an opportunity to clarify the issues.