Early versus delayed-interval laparoscopic cholecystectomy for acute cholecystitis: a metaanalysis

Excerpt

We read with great interest the meta-analysis on early versus delayed laparoscopic cholecystectomy for acute cholecystitis that appeared in the January 2005 issue of Surgical Endoscopy [1]. We particularly appreciated the extensive description of the methodology and would be grateful if the authors could provide more details concerning their literature search: actually, they totally ignored the existence of two comparable meta-analyses on the same topic [2, 3]. A simple MEDLINE search using the keyword “cholecystectomy” and the limit to “meta-analysis” as publication type retrieves 27 hits, of which these are number 7 and number 1, respectively. While the second study [3] was published only in July 2005, our meta-analysis [2] was available in January 2004, more than a year before the submission of this manuscript for publication. …