I was interested to read the paper by Modarres and colleagues1 entitled “Intravitreal erythropoietin injection for the treatment of non-arteritic anterior ischaemic optic neuropathy” (NA-AION). The authors have made several misleading statements that require comment.

In my prospective study2 of visual outcome in 312 patients with NA-AION treated with corticosteroid therapy versus 301 untreated cases, there was a significantly higher visual acuity (p=0.001) and visual field (p=0.005) improvement in the treated than the untreated group. Modarres and colleagues commented that the claims of that study are not justified because of “lack of randomization, the retrospective nature of the study and the lack of corroboration via other studies”. None of these statements is correct: it was …