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Editors Selection IGR 7-3

Clinical examination methods: Structure and population

Comment by Stefano Miglior on:

12523 Laser scanning tomography of the optic nerve head in a normal elderly population: The Bridlington Eye Assessment Project, Vernon SA; Hawker MJ; Ainsworth G et al., Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, 2005; 46: 2823-2828

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The paper by Vernon et al. (520) reports the results of a population-based HRT II study performed in the village of Bridlington (UK) - the Bridlington Eye Assessment Project.

To the best of my knowledge this is the first HRT population-based study performed so far. It evant information concerning the distribution of HRT optic disc parameters in the normal population (which is quite surprising as the HRT has been introduced more than 15 years ago). This study reports a detailed descriptive statistic of the HRT stereometric parameters of both eyes of each participant and a detailed analys of the correlations between each parameter and disc size, age, and gender. The age of the population was greater than 64 years, and the sample was composed of 262 women and 197 men for a total of 459 individuals. The main findings of this study are the lack of correlation between age and the HRT parameters (although the small age range was a limitation for this analysis), the gender-related significant difference of most HRT parameters, the correlation between cup and disc area (r² = 0.54) which is stronger than the correlation between rim and disc area (r² = 0.47). These results confirm some previous observations and contradict some other (the relevance of age and the irrelevance of gender). Since previous results were often reported in small series and in clinical based studies, the study of Vernon should be taken with particular attention given the size of the examined sample and the lack of recruitment bias. The Authors should be congratulated for performing this study, which may provide an unique opportunity to provide the HRT system with a large and unbiased population-based normative database.

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