Sir,I write this in response to the letter to editor comments[1] on the article “Association of obesity and age-related macular degeneration (AMD) in Indian population.”[2]It is always a critical decision whether to consider both eyes for analysis or take one eye (either better or worse). Being a population-based study and when it comes to finding an association between a systemic disease and ocular condition, where our results also reflect the prevalence of AMD in various obesity indices, we decided to consider the stage of worse eye for analysis.Another main reason we did not consider both eyes is that 95% of our data had similar AMD stage between eyes with an inter-eye correlation of 0.82 (P < 0.0001). In this scenario, we were convinced that taking one eye will work best. And we do not expect much variation between the association with considering single eye and taking both eyes and accounting for inter-eye dependency with generalized estimation equation (GEE) or any other repeated measure models. And the association is clearly non-significant with the worse eye, so we definitely do not expect an association while considering better eye, keeping in mind that only 5% of data will be varied in that case.
Financial support and sponsorship
This work was funded by the Jamshetji Tata Trust, Mumbai.