In reply
Drs Moriarty and Dowd direct their major criticism against a point of our study design in which patients were using a single topical antiglaucoma therapy, in practice timolol or pilocarpine, as monotherapy when enrolling in the trial and not receiving a combination of timolol and pilocarpine given separately. Later, they emphasize the importance of this type of design and present their own findings to indicate that 2% pilocarpine four times daily with 0.5% timolol twice daily given concomitantly were more effective in lowering IOP than a fixed-ratio combination of these drugs twice daily. We appreciate their comments, and the results arouse keen interest. We are, however, somewhat skeptical as to whether Student's t test was a valid choice in analyzing differences in the cohort of 25 patients from whom eight were withdrawn from the trial and by whom the IOP changes posed rather high variances (numeric SDs greater