Authors' reply

Anirban Ghosh¹, Amlan Kanti Biswas², Avinandan Banerjee³,  
¹ Department of Medicine, ESI-PGIMSR and ESIC Medical College, Joka, Kolkata, West Bengal, India
² Department of Medical College and Hospital, IPGME and R, Kolkata, West Bengal, India
³ Department of Nephrology, IPGME and R, Kolkata, West Bengal, India

Correspondence Address:
Anirban Ghosh
Department of Medicine, ESI-PGIMSR and ESIC Medical College, Joka, Kolkata, West Bengal
India

Full Text

Sir,

We would like to express our sincere thanks and gratitude to the commentator for showing interest in our article and appreciating it. The observations made in your correspondence are relevant and important. We acknowledge the fact that an identical match was not possible with the data that we have obtained. We tried to have a similar age and sex profile of the two groups. However, we would like to reiterate that our study was a cross sectional study and not a case control study.[1] We cannot and do not intend to comment on the causal relationships between the exposure and outcome variables with this cross sectional study. We have only tried to highlight the statistically significant associations found in this study. A case control study with identical matches for age and sex with observations of the changes in the variables over a long period of time would definitely be more helpful in identifying the causal relationships between exposure and the outcome variables.

Financial support and sponsorship

Nil.

Conflicts of interest

There are no conflicts of interest.

References