LETTER TO EDITOR
Year : 2020 | Volume
: 7 | Issue : 3 | Page : 312-
The prevalence of and risk factors for peripheral arterial occlusive disease in human immunodeficiency virus-infected omani patients: The first study in GCC
Srineil Vuthaluru, Aditya Baksi
Department of Surgical Disciplines, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India
Correspondence Address:
Srineil Vuthaluru
Department of Surgical Disciplines, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi
India
How to cite this article:
Vuthaluru S, Baksi A. The prevalence of and risk factors for peripheral arterial occlusive disease in human immunodeficiency virus-infected omani patients: The first study in GCC.Indian J Vasc Endovasc Surg 2020;7:312-312
|
How to cite this URL:
Vuthaluru S, Baksi A. The prevalence of and risk factors for peripheral arterial occlusive disease in human immunodeficiency virus-infected omani patients: The first study in GCC. Indian J Vasc Endovasc Surg [serial online] 2020 [cited 2023 Feb 7 ];7:312-312
Available from: https://www.indjvascsurg.org/text.asp?2020/7/3/312/294929 |
Full Text
Sir,
We read with interest the study entitled “The prevalence of and risk factors for peripheral arterial occlusive disease in Human Immunodeficiency Virus infected Omani patients: The first study in GCC”. It has determined the prevalence of peripheral arterial occlusive disease (PAOD) in HIV-infected patients in Sultanate of Oman and attempted to correlate serum Vitamin D and albumin levels, glycated hemoglobin, and detectable viral load as risk factors for PAOD. Although the authors mentioned that data were analyzed using IBM Corp. Released 2013. IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 22.0. (Armonk, NY: IBM Corp.), there is no mention in methodology as to which statistical tests were used. The authors mention in the abstract that serum Vitamin D level and viral load stood out as risk factors, though, not attaining statistical significance. However, these findings have not been described in the results, nor has any quantitative measure of the correlation been given in the form of a correlation coefficient (e.g., Pearson or Spearman correlation coefficient). Representing the values of the risk factors in a tabular form with the exact P value would have more clearly reflected whether there is any trend toward statistical significance and the results attained in this study are due to low percentage of events due to small sample size. The authors have also not mentioned any P value for the various correlations. Even if a correlation did exist, the variables cannot be considered as risk factors based on this study, because causation is not established due to nonavailability of relative risk or odds ratio.
The authors have compared the prevalence of PAOD in this study with “international data” (1%–3% prevalence of PAOD in HIV-infected patients). However, since the aim of the study was to determine the prevalence of PAOD in HIV-infected patients of Oman, it would be more appropriate to compare the results with the prevalence of PAOD in the general population of Oman or its neighboring countries, as Caucasian data may be considerably dissimilar with data from the GCC.
Financial support and sponsorship
Nil.
Conflicts of interest
There are no conflicts of interest.
|
