Letter to the editor: Critics and Comments to the article
Sandeep Kumar Panigrahi, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Bhubaneswar
15 January 2015
I congratulate the authors for coming up with an interesting paper from the analysis of WHO SAGE secondary data. I would like to give few comments and would like to request the authors to address some queries. This would clarify similar doubts of other readers. Some studies and survey in USA and UK show that prevalence of obesity is more common in women of lower Socio-economic strata, while in men it is same for all income levels. Since NCD has relation with obesity how does it fit in this case, where epidemiological trends have come out to be something different in India. What can be the reasons have not been discussed in the discussion section. Second is that how can number of non-communicable diseases be said as continuous variable and analysis done accordingly? To my belief, it is a discrete variable. Is the analysis going to be affected if this is taken into account, may kindly be explained. Third is that in the abstract, the conclusion says that NCD multimorbidity is common in the Indian adults (though not mentioned in conclusion section of the main paper), which means age ≥ 18 years. Do the authors mean to say that multimorbidity is also common in adults of India? But the reference group the authors have selected is 18-29 years and not >64 years age. More-over there is no comparison between different groups of adults, or between adult and geriatric population, to derive a conclusion that MM NCDs are common in adults, though it is more common in elderly.
I may be mistaken in the way I have interpreted but would like to request the authors to make me clear regarding this.
3. Vellakkal S, Millett C, Basu S, Khan Z, Aitsi-Selmi A, Stuckler D, Ebrahim S. J Epidemiol Community Health. 2014 Dec 30. pii: jech-2014-204621. Are estimates of socioeconomic inequalities in chronic disease artefactually narrowed by self-reported measures of prevalence in low-income and middle-income countries? Findings from the WHO-SAGE survey. Assessed on 04 Jan 2015 at http://0-www-ncbi-nlm-nih-gov.brum.beds.ac.uk/pubmed/25550454
Letter to the editor: Critics and Comments to the article
15 January 2015
I congratulate the authors for coming up with an interesting paper from the analysis of WHO SAGE secondary data. I would like to give few comments and would like to request the authors to address some queries. This would clarify similar doubts of other readers. Some studies and survey in USA and UK show that prevalence of obesity is more common in women of lower Socio-economic strata, while in men it is same for all income levels. Since NCD has relation with obesity how does it fit in this case, where epidemiological trends have come out to be something different in India. What can be the reasons have not been discussed in the discussion section. Second is that how can number of non-communicable diseases be said as continuous variable and analysis done accordingly? To my belief, it is a discrete variable. Is the analysis going to be affected if this is taken into account, may kindly be explained. Third is that in the abstract, the conclusion says that NCD multimorbidity is common in the Indian adults (though not mentioned in conclusion section of the main paper), which means age ≥ 18 years. Do the authors mean to say that multimorbidity is also common in adults of India? But the reference group the authors have selected is 18-29 years and not >64 years age. More-over there is no comparison between different groups of adults, or between adult and geriatric population, to derive a conclusion that MM NCDs are common in adults, though it is more common in elderly.
I may be mistaken in the way I have interpreted but would like to request the authors to make me clear regarding this.
Bibliography
1. Obesity and Socioeconomic Status in Adults: United States, 2005–2008. Accessed on 04 January 2015 at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db50.htm
2. Statistics and probability dictionary. Assessed on 04 January 2015 at http://stattrek.com/statistics/dictionary.aspx?definition=continuous_variable
3. Vellakkal S, Millett C, Basu S, Khan Z, Aitsi-Selmi A, Stuckler D, Ebrahim S. J Epidemiol Community Health. 2014 Dec 30. pii: jech-2014-204621. Are estimates of socioeconomic inequalities in chronic disease artefactually narrowed by self-reported measures of prevalence in low-income and middle-income countries? Findings from the WHO-SAGE survey. Assessed on 04 Jan 2015 at http://0-www-ncbi-nlm-nih-gov.brum.beds.ac.uk/pubmed/25550454
Competing interests
No competing interest exists.