Bill Harvey: Trading with your life

If you had exactly 10 years left to live but could trade some of them in return for a total cure for persistent and troubling symptomatic floaters, how much life would you trade?

Readers will be more than used to reading papers in refereed journals and recognising the various analyses used to identify data relevance. There is a myriad of options, ranging from defined diagnoses rates, probability indicators, and statistical assessment of differences between groupings through to subjective ratings and question response analyses. Even within studies applying similar analytical methods, one has to be aware of influences such as sample size, incentive biases (is this free lens better than the old ones you pay for?), questionnaire subtleties, the make up of the sample (AREDS2 was criticised for using subjects of a more, shall we say, nutritionally aware lifestyle to name but a few).