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Eur J Cardiothorac Surg 2006;29:633
© 2006 Elsevier Science NL

Letter to the Editor

Reply to Takagi et al.

^a Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard University, Boston, MA, USA
^b Division of Cardiac Surgery and Department of Epidemiology, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ont., Canada

Received 5 January 2006; accepted 9 January 2006.

^_* Corresponding author. Address: University of Ottawa Heart Institute, Room H-3401, 40 Ruskin Street, Ottawa, Ont., Canada K1Y 4W7. Tel.: +1 613 761 4720; fax: +1 613 761 4713. (Email: mruel@ottawaheart.ca).

Key Words: Coronary artery bypass surgery • Percutaneous coronary interventions • Left internal thoracic artery • Stents • Meta-analysis

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

In response to our meta-analysis [1] comparing surgical versus percutaneous treatment of isolated LAD disease, Takagi et al. [2] present, in the form of a letter to the editor of the European Journal of Cardio-thoracic Surgery, the results of a ‘sub-meta-analysis’ of a subset of randomized trials where only minimally invasive bypass techniques were utilized for surgical revascularization. The authors justify the need for this ‘sub-meta-analysis’ by stating that there was a significant heterogeneity in the method of surgical revascularization used between the studies included in our meta-analysis. Furthermore, they state that because the type of surgical revascularization was . . . [Full Text of this Article]