Response to Dr. Bendavid:

Excerpt

We thank Dr. Bendavid for his valuable comments to our article on inguinal hernias in females. We excuse that we apparently have overlooked some series on the topic, although most of the references mentioned by Dr. Bendavid applies to femoral and not inguinal female hernias. We agree that assessment of recurrences can be made by objective assessment or by re-operation rates, the latter being well documented to give about a 50% of the true recurrence rate. However, this does in no way invalidate our study, which demonstrates the unexpected high re-operation rate after female inguinal herniorrhaphy. Also, we will emphasize that our study is the first and largest nationwide, unselected data available in the literature since the data Dr. Bendavid refers to are from selected series. Although such series obviously are valuable for interpretation, our data on common practise in a country are similarly of valuable to discuss future strategies. We agree, as demonstrated in our article, that the unexpected high recurrence rate probably is due to “overlooked” femoral hernias. …