Neurodevelopmental Outcomes of Preterm Infants With Retinopathy of Prematurity by Treatment

Because most studies regarding neurodevelopment in retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) are small and single-center studies, we commend the authors for this retrospective multicenter analysis of prospectively collected data comparing anti–vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) with laser treatment.1 Although they found no difference in their primary outcome of severe neurodevelopmental impairment (NDI) or death, when examined separately, they found a higher rate of death but not of NDI. Unfortunately, as a nonrandomized study, it suffers from imbalance in baseline characteristics, which limits robustness. First, as the authors acknowledge, infants who received bevacizumab were smaller and sicker. At baseline, infants treated with bevacizumab had lower median birth weight ( P = .02), gestational age ( P = .05), and … E-mail: gnatara{at}med.wayne.edu