Risk Factors for and Long-term Outcomes of Anastomotic Leakage After Colorectal Cancer Surgery: Reply

Excerpt

We greatly appreciate Dr. Akiyoshi and colleagues’ interest in our manuscript titled Risk Factors and Outcomes for Anastomotic Leakage in Colorectal Surgery: A Single-institution Analysis of 1,576 Patients [1]. The authors explain that their primary concern was the validity of our multivariate analysis based on a perceived disagreement of numbers. Their comment, “elective procedures of bowel resection in combination with (N = 1,430) or without (N = 38) gynecological procedures were subjected to multivariate analysis. However, Table 1 showed that 266 of 1,576 patients underwent emergency operation, and that is, elective operation was performed in 1,310 patients” expresses concerns that a number of elective cases reported in Table 1 have been excluded from the multivariate analysis; however, this is not the case. Unfortunately, it seems they have misread the data in Table 2 by swapping number of elective operations in combination with gynecological procedures N = 38 with all other operations N = 1,430, not the other way around, and this has led to their erroneous conclusion of data error. We accept that the category of “all other operations” may be unclear, as it does in fact include emergency and elective operations. However, as noted in the footnote to that table, all data have been adjusted for confounding in regard to this variable, among others. …