Survival of Patients With Cataract

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Abstract
To the Editor. —Reviewing the literature on the survival of patients with cataract, Hirsch and Schwartz1 found that previously published reports on the subject yielded "conflicting conclusions." They explained the difference by the fact that in previous studies survival of patients with cataract was compared with that of the general population. Hirsch and Schwartz1 instead created a reference group of subjects and concluded that patients who were 50 years of age or older when undergoing cataract extraction had nearly twice the mortality of the reference patients, after the data had been stratified according to age and sex. However, even their approach does not seem to be methodologically correct, since the control group consisted of patients operated on for different conditions, some of which (eg, cholecystopathy, hemorrhoids, and varicose veins) were related to occupation, obesity, and other factors, which makes any comparison rather obscure. For this reason we created two

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