Dear Editor,
We greatly appreciate the interest that Dr. Sabouri has shown in our article, as well as his invaluable comments about our study that was recently published in your esteemed journal.[1]
I would like to respectfully draw your attention to a limitation in our study that was briefly discussed in the manuscript: the lack of a comparative group. We agree with Dr. Sabouri's reasonable concerns based on literature in this field[2,3] that utilized each study subject's fellow eye as a comparative control during any intervention – this was considered as an advantageous study design. Indeed, our future study designs will respect this valuable insight.
The other point emphasized by Dr. Sabouri was the importance of ethnicity in the ocular characteristics of a patient group,[4,5] which has been confirmed in multiple epidemiological studies. Regarding this point, I respectfully draw your attention to the Discussion section (paragraph 7, line 6), wherein we discussed the importance of ethnicity in addition to other ocular parameters that were not evaluated in our study subjects.[1] Furthermore, recently, we highlighted (in Shiraz) the importance of ethnicity[6] in measurements of central corneal thickness (CCT) and intraocular pressure (IOP) within a study of Persian children. Once again, the omission of ethnicity information could be considered a limitation in our study. Future studies, which specifically evaluate subjects’ ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds, are warranted to determine whether these factors influence corneal endothelial cell density and cell morphology.
Financial Support and Sponsorship
Nil.
Conflicts of Interest
There are no conflicts of interest.
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