SIR: I would like to thank Dr Ozgonul and colleagues for their letter and suggestions.
It is true, in the literature, there have been many studies evaluating the relationship between drinking patterns and various corneal diseases and other ocular surface diseases. However, our study was a population-based survey and most of the participants were representative of the healthy population. Details of the type of corneal diseases have been published in another paper.Citation1 In our study, the prevalence of corneal blindness was only 0.3% and the leading cause was keratitis in childhood (40%), followed by ocular trauma (33.3%). Not all the corneal blindness from ocular trauma was due to alcohol consumption. In addition, there are no characteristics in retinal findings of alcohol consumption. It is hard to be sure whether or not a relationship exists between alcohol consumption and retinal disease in a certain participant. According to Fan and co-authors,Citation2 heavy drinking was associated with higher odds of age-related eye diseases such as cataract, glaucoma, age-related macular degeneration, and diabetic retinopathy. With the length limit of the paper, the authors didn’t report the different prevalences of corneal diseases and other retinal diseases between the alcohol consumption and control groups. The question you addressed could be reported in a future paper.
References
- Wang H, Zhang Y, Li Z, et al. Prevalence and causes of corneal blindness. Clin Exp Ophthalmol 2014;42(3):249–253
- Fan AZ, Li Y, Zhang X, et al. Alcohol consumption, drinking pattern, and self-reported visual impairment. Ophthalmic Epidemiol 2012;19(1):8–15