To the Editor:
We read with interest the article titled “The effect of home education on myopia progression in children during the COVID-19 pandemic” by Aslan F and Sahinoglu-Keskek N, recently published in Eye [1]. The authors have extensively reviewed the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions on myopia progression in school-aged children. We would hereby like to suggest that the analysis should select the data from the monocular eye. Generally speaking, measurements obtained from the right and left eye of a subject are often correlated whereas many statistical tests assume observations in a sample are independent. Hence, data collected from both eyes cannot be combined without taking this correlation into account. If one eye is studied and both are eligible, then it should be chosen at random. Most of the previous studies are used for reference [2, 3], and in order to avoid the influence of binocular correlation on the results and the introduction of more systematic errors, we choose the right eye from each participant for data analysis. As for correlation analysis, if the basic information of the person, such as age and sex, is reused twice, it may have an impact on the results.
References
Aslan F, Sahinoglu-Keskek N. The effect of home education on myopia progression in children during the COVID-19 pandemic. Eye. 2021. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41433-021-01655-2
Liu B, Wang Y, Li T, Lin Y, Ma W, Chen X, et al. Correlation of subfoveal choroidal thickness with axial length, refractive error, and age in adult highly myopic eyes. BMC Ophthalmol. 2018;18:127.
Kato K, Kondo M, Takeuchi M, Hirano K. Refractive error and biometrics of anterior segment of eyes of healthy young university students in Japan. Sci Rep. 2019;9:15337.
Acknowledgements
Supported by grants from the Key Projects of Science and Technology Fund of Tianjin Health and Family Planning Commission (2014KR17), the Science and Technology Foundation of Tianjin Eye Hospital (YKYB2007), and the Tianjin Key Medical Discipline (Specialty) Construction Project.
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QF contributed to the overall concept, literature search, analysis and interpretation of the literature, writing of the paper.
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Fan, Q. Comment on: The effect of home education on myopia progression in children during the COVID-19 pandemic. Eye 36, 2225 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41433-022-02042-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41433-022-02042-1