Letter to the editor in response to: Effect of COVID-19 lockdown on patients with chronic diseases.

Dear Editor

We read the article by Saqib et al. [1] in this journal with great interest. The author needs compliments for the efforts put in reviewing effect of COVID-19 lockdown on patients with chronic diseases. The ill effects of lockdown on chronic disease and increased risk of occurrence of diseases has been well documented [[2], [3], [4]] [[2], [3], [4]] [[2], [3], [4]] and the contribution of the authors to literature is noteworthy, and we would like to make a few comments about the article.

We feel that authors should have taken into consideration any flue or flue like illness in the past 2 weeks of survey which would have indirectly affected the results of the survey.

A balanced diet is a must for good immunity, especially during such pandemic [5,6]. The effects of lockdown affected the availability of basic ingredients resulting in consumption of poor-quality diets. The authors did not consider the dietary habits of the patients which may influence the outcome and prognosis of chronic illness.

There is anxiety and depression among health care workers during this pandemic which is mainly attributed to prolonged work shift, fear of infection to family and lack of personal protective equipment (PPEs) [7]. And hence the health care workers should have been as a separate profession as this would influence the mental illness parameter.

The author did not take weight gain into account as weight gain is an important health parameter influencing the physical and mental status of the population. The lockdown has become a major cause of weight gain, because of poor physical activity and increased consumption of calorie-dense foods [6,8].

The criteria for self-reported overall heath is not clear. What were the parameters for self-assessment? The self-reported overall heath shows and fair, good, very good and its respective values, however we fail to understand what do the author mean by its effect on health as stated in Table 1 [1].

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.