Reply to Peihua Liu, Yangle Li’s Letter to the Editor regarding the article “Radical prostatectomy after previous transurethral resection of the prostate: oncological, surgical and functional outcomes—a meta-analysis”

Excerpt

Thank you very much for your careful reading of our research and your valuable comments. It is necessary for us to explain your questiones. Firstly, not every meta-analysis need to be registered. For example, Donaldson's meta-analysis published in the European Journal of Urology was not registered [1], and du [2], Zhou [3], Li [4] and so on are also not registered. Secondly, in the three studies, TURP group includes a very small number of open prostatectomy patients. Due to the small number of patients, we believethat it has no significant influence on the overall conclusion. Thirdly, we search the EMBASE, PubMed,the Cochrane Library and find Fragkoulis [5], Pastore [6] and Ramirez [7], but we couldn't get the original text at that time, so we excluded them. Finally, match analysis is performed in ten of the 13 studies, so we believe that the basic characteristics of the two groups are basically the same. For example, Gleason scores of the two groups were the same in each study. …