Sir,

Thank you for the opportunity to respond to Dr Weekitt Kittisupamongkol's comments. In our service, steroids are used only during small periods of time (typically 15 days) to treat patients with the active phase of Graves' orbitopathy. None of the 107 patients studied presented with this condition. All the patients included in the study were in the chronic (cicatricial) phase of the disease and thus were not using steroids. We apologize for not including in the paper the information that the presence of active orbitopathy was an exclusion criterion.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.