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Editors Selection IGR 11-3
Risk Factors: Is body height a risk factor?
Comment by Luca Rossetti on:
24983 Body height and ocular diseases. The Beijing Eye Study, Xie XW; Xu L; Wang YX et al., Graefe's Archive for Clinical and Experimental Ophthalmology, 2009; 247: 1651-1657
Italy Xie et al. (1749) report on the analysis of the data from a populationbased prospective cohort study (The Beijing Eye Study) carried out in Northern China with the aim of testing the association between body height and a number of ocular disorders. The univariate analysis of these data shows that a number of eye diseases (i.e., angle-closure glaucoma, trachoma, pterygium and cortical cataract) were found significantly associated with body height, while in the multivariate analysis, after controlling for confounders, body height by itself was no longer associated with the presence of any of the disorders tested. As in all population-based studies, in particular those involving subjects living in rural areas, the presence of socioeconomic confounding factors plays a major role in the associations between variables. In the Beijing Eye Study, short body stature was not in fact associated with any eye disease, when factors like age, level of education, rural vs. urban region or variables like anterior chamber depth and refractive error were tested in the model. As expected, body height is likely to be just a confounder for something else, like living in rural vs. urban region for diseases as trachoma or like anterior chamber depth for angle-closure glaucoma. Worth to be commented the fact that the authors considered body height as the dependent variable in the model and other 'putative risk factors' and the eye diseases as well as independent variables. Some potentially relevant study limitations are discussed: the fact that the final response rate to the study was about 60% of the originally invited sample and the possibility that the results could not be applicable to the whole region as the average income of participants in the survey was much higher than in other urban areas of Beijing.
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